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Laws Of Attraction
Movie
Laws Of Attraction
Director
Peter Howitt
Cast
Pierce Brosnon, Julianne Moore

By Subhash K Jha


If you love Brosnon in his `James Bond` avatar, and if you think Julianne Moore was awesome in Stephen Daldry's The Hours, do yourself-and the stars-a favour. Stay away from this dull and dreadful romantic comedy about two warring attorneys who fall in love as predictably as the logs on the pyre turn to ashes.

This slow-burn movie, tedious even within its 90 minutes of playing time, is the worst form of dis-service done to the actors who participate in the wry rites of romanticism.

From the moment we encounter Audrey (Moore) bustling around with a secret camera taking pictures in a mansion to get a woman her alimony-loot, we know what director Peter Howitt has in store. He wants to make his protagonists unpleasantly attractive.

Howitt's earlier films, notably Sliding Doors, exuded the aroma of scented sensuality.

Laws Of Attraction is plainly decadent in mood. The situations created in the plot are so mawkish, you want to throttle the people who thought it could ever be amusing to see Brosnon and Moore getting drunk and into bed, and waking up in dreadful embarrassment the morning after.

The 'joke', ha ha, is encored when in Ireland (ah, you can't keep an Irish actor like Brosnon too far away from home!) the couple gets tipsy, goes through local marriage rituals and awakens to a new dawn..or do I mean dumb?

Every sunrise in the scriptwriter's intellect is a new occasion for tedium and exasperation. Just what were the makers of this trite titter peretrator thinking when they sat down to make Laws Of Attraction? To cast Brosnon as a fading lover-boy and Moore as a prim middleaged neurotic lover-girl seems like a good idea to begin with.

The two could have been as funny as Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in their best romantic comedies.

Alas, there's absolutely no chemistry-crackling or otherwise-between Brosnon and Moore. As they fight in the court(always in front of an entertaining judge, played with entertaining solemnity by Nora Dunn) and in the bedroom , all we can think of is. What the heck are the two doing together.Besides trying to be sassy and satirical, and failing miserable.

The silver lining, if you stay up long enough, is a divorcing couple, played by Michael Sheen and Parker Posey. Playing a debauched rock star and his whining wife, they live up to every stereotype associated with show world and yet provide some entertaining moments-something that our lead pair, romantic in their intent but plainly dull in transposition, are unable to do.

But of course Brosnon and Moore are opposing attorneys in the rock star's divorce proceedings. How could we miss the obvious in search of a deeper meaning? Laws Of Attraction doesn't afford us the luxury of looking beyond the surface.

Both the lead actors are awfully strained and unappetising. What were Pierce Brosnon and Julianne Moore thinking when they signed this potentially disastrous film? Apart from the zeroes on the cheque, that is.

The best performance comes from Sara Miller as Moore's feisty age-retarding mom who hates being called Mom in public. A potentially grotesque stereotype, the character floats freely to the surface of this film's boggy ambience. The rest of the cast simply sinks. Do they regret doing this film? I haven't a crew!

God save the Romantic Comedy!