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Excepting an early supporting role in the surfer flick Blue Juice, Catherine Zeta-Jones has remained one of the most impersonal actresses ever to disgrace the silver screen. Chock-full of smugness and self-awareness, she’s so overly-mannered that you’re always aware of watching her rather than her character, which is even more a serious liability in a starring role, which the puerile romantic comedy No Reservations unfortunately affords her. Here, she plays the head chef of an upscale Manhattan restaurant who gets up early to buy quality seafood at the docks, runs her kitchen with martinet control, and gets more than the slightest bit peeved if a customer dare complains about her cooking. With a nonexistent social life (in the dreadful scenes with her psychiatrist, we’re told she hasn’t had a date in years but not on earth why) she’s brought up short when her sister dies in a car accident and is stuck trying to raise her young niece with no experience and a late-night work schedule. Further complicating matters is equally-talented chef Aaron Eckhart, who’s been hired to pick up the slack that her tardiness and absences are ringing up. Of course, she’s initially resistant to his effortless charm but is soon (you got it!) won over by it as her freeze-dried heart starts to melt. Predictability isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the cinematic world if there’s some genuine feeling and conviction in both the story and characters, but neither one possesses not so much as an iota of either. The screenplay is like the most synthetic of blueprints with such a high degree of poor dialogue and obvious situations that it makes those ultra-light Nora Ephron travesties seem purely Shakespearean by comparison. And certainly not helping matters is that dire director Scott Hicks, who douses the proceedings with the same fatal heavy-handedness that helped wreck his Shine and Snow Falling On Cedars. I don’t know what Hicks should be doing for a career, but one in this particular artistic field certainly isn’t one of them, as is further evidenced by the two gag-reflex musical montages on nauseous display in this painfully overlong boondoggle. The film is bereft of tempo, bounce, color and agility in the juxtaposing, and even the always-welcome Eckhart, who lacks any chemistry with his co-star, seems uncomfortable with the material from the get-go -- it’s as if a revenge-seeking agent booked him into this joint as some form of retribution. Still, a halfway-appealing lead thespian might’ve cushioned things a bit, but emotionally and erotically Zeta-Jones is a zero. There’s potential for humor when her Kate is aghast over the mere thought of serving her hard-to-please niece fish sticks, but she can’t bring it off (comic timing is as alien to her as scruples to an Enron exec); and when she’s supposed to be glowing with long-denied love, she’s virtually impenetrable and as rigid as an overdosed Botox patient. In the end, not even a master animator like Ralph Bakshi could succeed in getting anything remotely resembling vibrancy out of her.

Like the limited Nicole Kidman, Zeta-Jones married a top well-respected movie star which surely figured into her undeserved Oscar win.

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originally posted: 08/13/09 04:08:16
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