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By Cole Smithey

‘Bride Wars’

Starring Anne Hathaway, Kate Hudson, Candice Bergen and Chris Pratt, Rated PG, 90 minutes

Movie Trailer

With a title like “Bride Wars” you’d expect some explosive comic moments of wedding sabotage and subterfuge, but instead you get a clunky formulaic romantic comedy, even by Hollywood standards. Had Liv (Kate Hudson) married her best friend and rival Emma (Anne Hathaway) it would have at least followed in the manner of the pair’s giddy love fest relationship that suffers a relatively brief catfight.

Best friends since childhood, Liv and Emma have long shared a dream of holding their wedding day at Manhattan’s glamorous Plaza Hotel. Crisis comes via wedding planner extraordinaire Marion St. Claire (Candice Bergen), whose voice-over narration provides unnecessary exposition. St. Claire’s facade of nuptial planning perfection collapses when she mixes the dates of Liv’s and Emma’s June weddings to coincide on the same day. Obligatory shopping, arguing and dance sequences lead to a feeble climax. For their part, Hudson and Hathaway share little chemistry together in spite of their polished individual comic abilities. The worst thing about “Bride Wars” is that it’s a boring movie.

Every year Hollywood spits out a quota of romantic comedies not fit even for airline viewing. As years pass, the standby of rom-coms centered around weddings have started to resemble museum artifacts associated with a tradition of marriage that more and more people look at as obsolete. From its opening childhood flashback sequence of young Liv and Emma gazing longingly at the bride in a wedding ceremony, “Bride Wars” adopts a condescending tone of commercial satisfaction that Hudson and Hathaway have bought into hook, line and sinker. The film’s would-be target audience of 10 to 16-year-old girls will want to go home and prissy themselves up dreaming of a day that, as statistics show, may not come. That’s not to say that this audience is missing the retail message about buying clothes, jewelry, make-up, and all-things “dreamy.”

Emma’s low income as a schoolteacher matters not compared with Liv’s fat bank account from working as a hotshot corporate attorney. The income discrepancy is just one of many ripe opportunities for satire that the screenwriting committee of Greg DePaul, Casey Wilson, and June Diane Raphael skip over in favor of stumbling through two acts of “OMG” shopping kissyface. The about-to-be-husbands are as bland as toast, and it’s in this particular area of masculine representation that the writers hit a stream of false notes. Without interesting secondary characters, the film has nowhere to go when the camera isn’t on Hudson or Hathaway.

Hudson is listed as one of the film’s three producers and at this point in her active-but-second-rate career, she seems to believe doing a fluff movie opposite rising star Hathaway will lend some momentum in spite of the source material’s less than banal substance. It’s been a long time since Hudson’s terrific performance in “Almost Famous” made her famous, and the young actress is clearly capable of much better work. Sometimes you just need better script readers. CV

‘Nothing But the Truth’

Starring Kate Beckinsale, Vera Farmiga, Matt Dillon and Noah Wyle, Rated R, 107 minutes

Movie Trailer

Clearly inspired by Judith Miller’s role in the Valerie Plame case, writer/director Rod Lurie (“The Contender”) takes dramatic liberties to allow for a provocative treatment of an ongoing battle for civil liberties exacted in the name of national security.

Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale) is a newspaper journalist working on a story that will expose her soccer mom neighbor Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga) as a covert C.I.A. agent. After the story runs, the Government assigns special prosecutor Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon) to induce Armstrong to hand over her source or face a prison sentence that she is fully prepared to serve. Lurie balances the tragic repercussions of two women drawn into a swirling riptide of political neglect, judicial irresponsibility and sudden violence. Lurie’s pitch-perfect dialogue keeps the thriller humming with expressive tension and biting satire.

Peeking out through the straightforward thriller is a question about the evaporation of government accountability and its inability to police itself. The government’s hollow-tipped spear of “national security” taking precedence over Armstrong’s First Amendment rights, serves as the theme that Lurie suspends his multi-dimensional characters from.

Armstrong and Van Doren are painted as likeable but fiercely committed women, poised as polar rivals in their professional lives. Lurie eloquently connects a specifically female logic that comes home to roost in a third-act stroke of thematic and narrative wit that beautifully a fundamental narrative question.

We are drawn to Beckinsale’s spunky journalist whose team of editors and the Capitol Sun Times support her decision to out Van Doren’s classified identity. After an assassination attempt on the U.S. President, allegedly by the leader of Venezuela, we learn Van Doren’s husband recently abandoned his role as ambassador to Venezuela due to conflicts with the White House administration.

The movie suffers from two minor flaws — Van Doren’s non-present husband, and her un-spy-like behavior at a critical moment in the driveway of her home. The shear force of the tightly turning plot and the psychological drama at hand overshadows these narrative ruts in the road. Armstrong is tossed in jail while her husband (David Schwimmer) publicly peruses other women, and she loses touch with her young son. Behind-the-scene courtroom battles bristle between Armstrong’s skillful high-stakes attorney Albert Burnside (Alan Alda) and Dillon’s brutally determined prosecutor Dubois.

As much as there are similarities to the Valerie Plame/Judith Miller case, “Noting But the Truth” makes no bones about using a piece of that complex chronicle as a dramatic stepping-off point to construct a polemical representation of ethical questions facing America. The film comes alive in several priceless scenes brimming with emotion and conscious resolve. Farmiga explodes from the screen in a particularly thorny cemetery conversation with her C.I.A. officers, and she nails a scene with a Barbara Walters-styled television interviewer trapped in her own web. The numerous, powerful performances Lurie extracts from his actors is commendable. Angela Bassett and Noah Wyle give strong supporting roles in a solid political thriller that is equal parts brain and heart. CV

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