In Two Weeks Notice,
Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant are in what's supposed to be a
modern-day Tracy-and-Hepburn comedy -- not only are those two great
names invoked specifically in one scene, but also that of another
great Hepburn, Audrey, who is then personified when Bullock turns up
in a following scene wearing an evening gown that could be one of
Givenchy's more dreamier creations.
Until then, Bullock wears cotton
peasant blouses and skirts to play an activist lawyer who lays down
in front of landmark buildings in order to prevent wreaking crews
from demolishing them. Grant plays a multi-trillionaire who wants to
demolish one of those buildings so he can put up another edifice of
greed and status. When he needs an assistant who can also function
as legal consul, Bullock takes the job -- she's going to change the
system from within! -- but he becomes so dependent on her that she
ends up quitting. Only when she sees him hire another cute young
thing in a skirt (Alicia Witt, in a truly thankless role) to fill
her vacancy does she realize that she's in love with him, and he
with her. And the world yawns.
The plot's so hackneyed that,
half-an-hour in, you can already figure out what's going to happen
during the rest of the movie, it's just going to take an awful long
while to get there. Trying to show that his character is shallow,
Grant speaks with the crisp, clipped diction of the young Laurence
Olivier, and he pronounces "answer" as "ahn-swer",
but he's also supposed to be a rapacious womanizer, and Grant has
too cultivated a persona to ever be convincing in that capacity.
Bullock, on the other hand, is supposed to come off as a little
goofy -- in every third or fourth scene, she has to contend with
having coffee flung down the front of her clothing, tripping over
potted plants, being hit between the eyes by a tennis ball, or, in
one scene, being rushed to facilities so she can alleviate herself
of gastrointestinal distress (and she's wearing white, in the scene,
as well). I remember women who said they got tired of watching
Rosanna Arquette having to trip all over herself in movies like The
Big Blue, and I doubt that people's feelings have changed much
since then. What interested us most about Sandra Bullock to begin
with was her combination of warmth and personableness, not her
ability to slip on a banana peel to get a quick laugh.
Review by Carrie Gorringe · Nitrate Online
