A few years ago, a studio would’ve dropped a piece of dreck like My Life in Ruins into a graveyard movie month like March and then hoped to get a return from pay cable and DVD profits. But recent so-called “chick flicks” like Mamma Mia!, Sex and the City, and The Devil Wears Prada have proven to be summertime mega-hits. Industry folk have reappraised the hot-weather months as a lucrative season for drawing adult female audiences. Post-Memorial Day crap is now custom-made for boys and girls.
This makes the term “chick flick” even more condescending than usual, since there’s no equally dismissive label for movies that typically lure men. (“Dick flick” probably wouldn’t make it into the pages of Variety.) Any movie that presumes too much about individual ticketbuyers based on their personal plumbing is destined to be reductive and programmatic. I’m no more excited to see Cameron Diaz/Katherine Heigl/Isla Fisher find true love with an unlikely paramour than I am to watch Nicolas Cage/Hugh Jackman/Jason Statham blow things up. Surprises are rare in either scenario.
If ever a movie deserved to be derided as a “chick flick,” though, it’s My Life in Ruins. Remember when star Nia Vardalos wrote and starred in a sweet, frantic, funny little movie called My Big Fat Greek Wedding that netted a global haul of $350 million? Hollywood doesn’t. Rather than tap her creative female mind again, the producers handed writing duties to Mike Reiss, a TV scripter who, though it’s hard to believe after viewing this slum project, worked on some of the best ’90s episodes of The Simpsons and The Larry Sanders Show. Directing duties went to Donald Petrie, who more believably has Miss Congeniality and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days on his resumé.
Vardalos’ distant Greek Wedding sizzle is all but extinguished here — she was obviously selected for this film as a marketing tool. She makes a rather disposable unlucky-in-love protagonist who’s going to get lucky this time. The plot and setting aren’t really important, but for the record, she’s an uptight tour guide leading a bus full of materialistic Americans, stuffy Brits, and beer-swilling Aussies through a land of Passionate Ethnic People (in this case, Greeks), who will provide the tourists with authentic soul as well as beautiful scenery, overpriced tchotchkes, and sweaty PG-13 sex.
My Life in Ruins is so galling because it’s so cynical. There’s no attempt at an original idea here, nor is any effort expended to make the comfortingly familiar “scenic romantic comedy” plusher and more satisfying. Sloppiness abounds to an insulting degree. The filmmakers believe that because the tourist bus driver (Alexis Georgoulis) first appears disguised in long hair and a bushy Moses beard, we won’t instantly figure out that he’s the hot Greek guy Vardalos will fall for. The name of Georgoulis’ character is “Poopi Kakas.” He has a nephew named “Doodi Kakas.” Of all the film’s many comic misfires, this running joke is the oddest. Since when did Sex and the City fans share a sense of humor with the people who buy those American Pie DVD sequels?
Richard Dreyfuss, whose knockout work as Dick Cheney in W. still lingers in the memory, delivers a pleasingly hammy supporting turn as a widower tourist on solo vacation. It’d be fine if he merely served as wisecracking counsel for several characters, but the script clumsily flirts with the notion that he might actually be a guardian angel or even God. The movie winds up literally sacrificing him on a beach after the others have gained happiness and perspective — and after co-executive producer Rita Wilson, the wife of Tom Hanks, makes a cameo as the ghost of the widower’s dead wife. This sentimental supernatural hokum sums up the whole of My Life in Ruins: awkward, cheap, and funny for all the wrong reasons. l
