Too bad that My One and Only, which has a lot
going for it even apart from the divine Renée Zellweger in the
principal role, finally turns itself into a pretty pedestrian
celebrity biopic. As the film takes some trouble to keep from us
the name of the celebrity until the very end, I will not reveal
it here, though a hint is provided when single mother Anne
Devereaux, played by Miss Zellweger, having arrived in sunny
California after a cross-country trip in a robin’s egg blue
Cadillac in 1953, tells her bookish teenage son: “Get some color,
George, you’re as white as a nun’s behind.” Besides being a po-mo
style in-joke, that striking metaphor is also meant to be an
example of mom’s wit, characteristically expressed (as George had
told the Cadillac dealer in New York at the outset of their
journey) aphoristically.
Besides her twin rules to live by, which are “never look in the
rear view mirror” — not even the literal rear view mirror, which
makes for an awkward joke or two — and “in the end, everything
works out; it always does,” she is the mistress of a vast store
of purpose-built proverbs. “That man is all potatoes and no
meat,” she says; or “A woman is never so intelligent to a man as
when she is listening to him.” She’s got a million of them, and
they’re all just about as short of genuine wit or humor — not
much, that is, but enough. The movie’s other great humor-mine is
the fact that Anne’s second son, Robbie (Mark Rendall), is a
flaming homosexual (are you still allowed to say that?) but, this
being 1953, he doesn’t know it yet. In short, My One and
Only is one of those movies — is it my imagination or
are they increasing in number — that should be called so funny
you forget to laugh.
All the same, it is engaging enough that its lack of laughs only
really dawns on you about half-way through. The story of a faded
Southern belle who buys the Cadillac and takes off on her
transcontinental journey with her two sons after catching her
band-leader husband (Kevin Bacon) with a floozie in their New
York apartment at least holds our interest. This being 1953 —
and the reminders of that fact in terms of commercial jingles and
suchlike from that era become a little bit tiresome — her quest
is to find another, more congenial husband, at first among her
legion of former beaux and then wherever she can find one. When,
for example, after a stop in Boston and near-marriage to a
tyrannical anti-communist Army officer (Chris Noth) — it
probably couldn’t be considered a Hollywood product without some
such gratuitous swipe at 1950s-style conservatism — they get to
Pittsburgh, mom tells her sons that “I almost married a man in
this city.
George replies: “You almost married a man in every city.”
“Sarcasm is the refuge of scoundrels,” sniffs mom,
aphoristically.
The tipping point where humor dips just a bit too far into pathos
comes when, abandoned by yet another rich prospect, Anne chats up
a man in a hotel bar who turns out to be a detective and arrests
her for solicitation. We like her a lot better when she is
pronouncing that “no matter what happens in our lives, there are
standards that must be maintained.” Pretty clearly, we are meant
to take her attachment to this principle seriously, yet the movie
is so resolutely attached to the teenage boy’s point of view that
she appears to us, as she must appear to him, rather a
fantastical creature than someone to be taken quite seriously.
He’s too busy asking himself what would Holden Caulfield do to
learn anything useful from her, and I don’t know if I’m quite
prepared to believe that.
At its heart, we may find Mr. Bacon’s philandering band-leader
telling his son that his mother’s problem is that she always
thought she was too good to work, being in her own eyes some kind
of “Southern royalty.” As his words of wisdom to the boy, he adds
that “Your mother has got delusions of grandeur. Take it from me,
kid, in the real world, class don’t count for nothing. If it
ain’t in the bank it ain’t anywhere.” The worst thing that can be
said about My One and Only is that you can’t be
quite sure that that isn’t its point of view too.
