‘Gray Matters’ is a clumsy ode to graceful old films

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, March 8, 2007

A lot of movies are made by boys. You can tell, because they have lists of boy things in them: sports, favorite songs, comic books, The Three Stooges. In short, these movies resemble Steve Carrell’s apartment in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

Well, “Gray Matters” is a girl movie. It’s crammed with writer-director Sue Kramer’s favorite girl things: 1940s movies, swing dancing, melty and supportive men, and Gloria Gaynor singing “I Will Survive.” Someone even quotes Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.”

Don’t get me wrong – women like sports, and men like 1940s movies. But you know what I mean.

Maybe because it feels like an indulgent compendium of Kramer’s enthusiasms, “Gray Matters” has an amateurish quality that won’t go away despite everybody’s best intentions.

Here’s the set-up. Siblings Gray (Heather Graham) and Sam (Tom Cavanaugh) decide to branch out from their strangely close relationship. Sam quickly falls in love with the first woman he dates, Charlie (Bridget Moynahan). They plan to marry within the week.

This leads to a tipsy Las Vegas trip and, for Gray, an unexpected revelation. She’s in love with Charlie, too.

Somehow this woman has reached 30 without realizing she’s a lesbian. If this could happen, it would require an actress with some ability to suggest how. Saucer-eyed, jiggly Heather Graham, whose stock in trade is a kind of relentless sincerity, is not that actress.

The film divvies up its comic relief: Molly Shannon as the caustic best friend (the role Eve Arden played in those 1940s movies), Alan Cumming as a taxi driver with lots of free advice and Sissy Spacek as Gray’s eccentric shrink. Everybody’s loose and silly – too much so. The movie has no grounding in anything.

It’s cute to see people dancing in routines that could have come from Astaire-and-Rogers movies, but cuteness doesn’t cover up distinctly clumsy dance moves. It’s one thing to celebrate the love of this kind of old-movie magic; it’s another to make the audience sit through a drawn-out copy of it.

Amateur hour: Boy (Tom Cavanaugh) meets Girl (Bridget Moynahan), but it turns out Boy’s sister (Heather Graham) is also in love with Girl. This movie invokes screwball comedies and Astaire-Rogers pictures, but there’s something amateurish about its enthusiasms, however well-intentioned.

Rating: PG-13 rating is for language, subject matter.

Now showing: Meridian