Ingratiating stars and a sitcom-style script make “Must Love Dogs” an agreeable night at the movies. One shudders to imagine this comedy without Diane Lane and John Cusack, two actors with strong, defined personalities.
“Must Love Dogs,” which is based on a novel by Claire Cook, seems tailor-made to please the fans Diane Lane developed with “Under the Tuscan Sun” and “A Walk on the Moon.”
Here she’s a divorced woman from a bustling Irish-American family, dipping her toe into the dating world. The movie is a series of disastrous blind dates and Internet match-ups, including one all-time bust when the date turns out to be her courtly father (Christopher Plummer).
Her focus narrows to two candidates. One is a dad (Dermot Mulroney) with a boy at the preschool where she teaches. The other is a romantic boatbuilder (Cusack), who answers her ad for the same reason she placed it: a friend set him up for it.
Their first scene is a nicely written bumble – two people hitting it off and messing it up. The only problem with the hour of film that follows is that these two are so obviously great together, it defies logic they wouldn’t hook up sooner.
Writer-director Gary David Goldberg, who made his name with sitcoms such as “Family Ties” and “Spin City,” relies on jokes and situations that will ring familiar to anybody who’s ever been on a date. These include the unscheduled drop-in at a prospect’s house (always risky) and a late-night dash around the city in search of a store that sells condoms (one of the funniest sequences in the picture).
Some of the gags are amusing, some of them are so familiar they almost lull you to sleep. I won’t soon forgive Goldberg for getting half the cast up to sing the theme song from “The Partridge Family.”
| Breezy: Sitcom-style comedy of a divorcee (Diane Lane) and her various Internet dates and set-ups. Lane and John Cusack have such strongly defined personalities they make the flimsy material work.
Rated: PG-13 rating is for subject matter. Now showing: tk |
Absolutely stock roles go to Elizabeth Perkins and Ali Hillis as Lane’s advice-happy sisters, Brad William Henke as Lane’s gay colleague, Stockard Channing as one of Dad’s new girlfriends, and Ben Shenkman as Cusack’s buddy.
Mostly, it has the stars. Diane Lane has become as comfortable as an old sweater in these kinds of roles: a regular 21st century gal, wary without being cynical, sexual without being slutty, adorable without acting cute. She’s a shining advertisement against plastic surgery for women of 40 – lines on the forehead and crow’s feet around the eyes have never looked better.
Cusack’s character is practically an update of his “Say Anything…” guy, still full of theories about life and wordy monologues on romance. Cusack’s persona has become so well-defined that when he slouches on screen we know what to expect, and welcome it.
“Must Love Dogs” is so breezy it vanishes from scene to scene. I don’t know if it really qualifies as a movie, but it knows how to uncork the one-liners that audiences like, and that probably will be enough.
Diane Lane and John Cusack star in “Must Love Dogs.”
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