By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
Hope for Hathaway
Okay, people, I need to get something off my chest here. What the hell happened to Anne Hathaway?
As I watched the Oscars, with poor Hathaway so gamely and desperately trying to make it work, I just felt … sad, I guess. What happened to the Anne Hathaway who showed such damn promise in Rachel Getting Married? Who the hell has been helping her choose her projects since then? I mean, really. Let’s go to the map:
Pre-Rachel, Hathaway first really came to notice for The Princess Diaries, a sugary-sweet contemporary fairy tale targeted at the tween girl market. She was only 19 then, so we can forgive her that; besides, she was by far the best thing about that movie. Then she did a bunch of other girly crap, blah blah blah, including Ella Enchanted, which wanted desperately to be EverAfter, but jusgt wasn’t as good. And then, finally, a real live grown-up role in Brokeback Mountain, where she showed dramatic promise, followed a year later by a starring turn in The Devil Wears Prada, where she was solid in a more comedic role.
Wow, we thought. This Hathaway chick, she might have some promise. And then more blah blah with Becoming Jane (meh) and Get Smart (whatever), and then, wham! she knocks it out of the damn ballpark with Rachel Getting Married, a role in which she was so good that now, after three or so years of crap like Bride Wars (why?) and Passengers (pass), I sometimes have to remind myself that yes, that really was Anne Hathaway in that role.
However, there’s hope. Hathaway stars, alongside Jim Sturgess, in One Day, the latest film by ace Danish director Lone Scherfig (An Education, Italian for Beginners). The screenplay is by David Nicholls (Starter for Ten), adapting his own novel. The story revisits a pair who have a one-nighter on the eve of their college graduation, every year on the same date to see where they are in their lives.
It sounds like a bit of a tricksy conceit to pull off in a movie, but at least it sounds interesting and challenging and not run-of-the-mill boring, and with Scherfig at the helm, I look for this to be more than your average rom-com. We’ll see … there may be hope for Hathaway yet.