Review

Review Date: 6-September-09
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

My One and Only (2009)

My One and Only is a cross between a book you were supposed to read in high school and a Hallmark Hall of Fame special, being a coming-of-age, family-oriented tale narrated by a soulful teen. It made me feel that I should have paid more attention to its use of metaphor in case that came up on the mid-term and that I should immediately send a "thinking of you" card to my grandmother.

The hero is played by Logan Lerman, soon to star as smart-ass demigod Percy Jackson, who might also be described as a literary representative of the struggles of youth. The story is based on the life of actor George Hamilton, which is somewhat unfortunate since his famously plastic features are antithetical to the innocence the movie describes. This innocence extends beyond the 1950s setting, George's pain over his parents' separation, and his wonder at seeing breasts for the first time. George's mother Ann (Renée Zellweger) is a child in her own way, having always believed that if a woman looks pretty, acts like a lady, and puts herself in the care of men, everything will work out fine. Now middle-aged she clings to this belief despite a short-lived first marriage, which produced flamboyantly gay son Robbie (Mark Rendall), and the dissolution of her second marriage upon catching her husband (Kevin Bacon) with another woman … again.

Ann cleans out a safe deposit box and takes her sons on the road to find Husband Number Three. From New York they go to Boston, where she gets robbed by an old flame and narrowly avoids wedlock to a brute; from Boston to Philadelphia, where her prospects are less than gallant (unless you count a strong-but-silent type many years her junior, which she doesn't, or not seriously); from Philly to the Midwest, where horse-and-buggy courtliness fades along with Ann's buoyancy and finances; and finally to Los Angeles, where she settles into a new life of self-sufficiency. Not only self-sufficiency but maternal sufficiency, having come to know her sons as she had never done as a piece of arm candy.

There is nothing glaringly wrong with this soft telling of a turbulent odyssey save that Zellweger's diminutive, bustling appearance does not fit the role of a great, if fading, beauty. If My One and Only were less willing to forgive its adults and marginalize its young hero, or more willing to lampoon the human defects illustrated by Ann's adventures and cheer the boy for breaking free of them, it might have packed more punch. (Or, who knows, it might have seemed like a knock-off of The Catcher in the Rye, which is frequently mentioned.) This is not one of those '50s melodramas about angry youth raging against foolish adulthood. It's about a '50s youth learning to live with and love a foolish adult.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.