Twenty years ago—almost to the
day—American moviegoers were
introduced to Sally Albright in Rob
Reiner and Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met
Sally. As played by Meg Ryan, she was
a sunny but tightly wound city girl who
found a perfect foil in loosey-goosey misanthrope
Harry Burns (Billy Crystal). Sally
owed more than a little to Holly Hunter’s
Type-A, scheduled-crying-jag TV news
producer Jane Craig in Broadcast News,
but she became the standard-bearer for a
certain kind of romantic-comedy heroine,
one we’ve already seen this summer in The
Proposal: the sympathetic control freak.
The Ugly Truth arrives on this auspicious anniversary for the “rom-com” genre to remind us that it takes more than a list-maker with a pretty face to earn the “sympathetic” part of that character description. Katherine Heigl may be trying desperately to channel some Sally—and some Jane—into her performance, but that’s not the same as giving an audience a reason to like her.
Heigl plays Abby Richter, whose occupation
happens to be—watch out, Jane
Craig!—a TV news producer. Overseeing a
Sacramento morning show that’s floundering
in the ratings, she’s also trying to find
the perfect guy who will fit all the criteria
on her checklist: being a “cat person,”
enjoying red wine, preferring tap water
over bottled, etc.
Enter—as complication to both professional
and personal life—Mike Chadway
(Gerard Butler). The host of a raunchy
public-access cable show called The Ugly
Truth—in which he gleefully shoots down
all romantic fantasies women may have
about one-thing-on-their-mind men—Mike
is brought in against Abby’s wishes to give
her show a spark. But when Abby wants to
seduce her new neighbor, a hot doctor (Eric
Winter), she grudgingly turns to Mike for
advice on what a guy really wants.
We expect the predictable complications
to play out before Abby and Mike
(SPOILER ALERT!) figure out
they’re crazy about each other,
and it’s certainly not a problem
that The Ugly Truth heads
precisely in that direction. Director Robert
Luketic (Legally Blonde, Win a Date With Tad
Hamilton!) has a fundamentally strong sense
for how to pace this un-ambitious brand of
comedy, as well as how to pick solid comic
performers—like John Michael Higgins and
Cheryl Hines as a sniping husband-and-wife
anchor team—for the supporting cast. As a
result, the film lopes along just waiting for
the moment when we start to care about
when and how our protagonists will get their
“happily ever after.”
That moment, however, never comes.
Butler (300, P.S. I Love You) can be charismatic
enough in the right circumstances,
but he seems hamstrung here by his efforts
to chew through his Glasgow brogue and
approximate an American accent. While the
script—by Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah
Lutz and Kirsten Smith—tries to soften him
up by giving him a nephew to mentor and a
back-story of heartbreak, he’s never particular
convincing either as a crass misogynist
or as a reformed crass misogynist.
And then there’s Heigl, who seemed
poised for a breakout in exactly this kind
of role after Knocked Up. Yet, there’s something
fundamentally chilly about the way
she comes off in The Ugly Truth. A character
like this needs to be more than a ball-buster
who learns to soften up; her complexity
needs to make sense from the outset. Heigl
certainly may be a game-enough performer
to be willing to hang upside-down from
a tree in the name of a sight gag, but that
doesn’t make her the kind of actress an
audience will embrace—and it doesn’t help
that, when Mike says it “beats the hell out
of me” why he loves Abby, it beats the hell
out of us, too.
Heigl’s also game enough to tackle what
was clearly intended as The Ugly Truth’s
big “outrageous” set piece, in which—don’t
even bother to ask how—Abby ends up at
a business dinner while wearing remote-controlled
vibrating underwear, with the
remote falling in hands of an oblivious young
boy at a nearby table. It’s impossible for the
moment not to evoke When Harry Met Sally’s
legendary deli scene, as Abby squeals and
contorts her way through an embarrassing
presentation to her bosses. But in this case,
it’s outrageousness without a human context,
just a ridiculous plot contrivance with
a risqué punch line. The Ugly Truth simply
doesn’t give us the kind of story where we
want to have what she’s having.
THE UGLY TRUTH
Katherine Heigl, Gerard Butler, Eric Winter
Rated R