by Everett Jensen

Created on: February 14, 2009

New In Town
directed by Jonas Elmer
written by Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox
starring Rene Zellweger, Harry Connick, Jr., Siobhan Fallon, J. K. Simmons, Frances Conroy, Mike O'Brien, Ferron Guerreiro

This fish out of water tale is charmingly rendered despite being wholly predictable and hackneyed.

Rene Zellweger plays Lucy Hill, a consultant for a major cooperation, who agrees to travel from Miami to Minnesota to streamline a plant so they can start making power bars. Naturally, she does not readily take to the climate and is viewed by a nuisance by most of the employees at the factory. The film tracks her transformation into something more useful to the locals as well as her budding romance with the union representative, Ted Mitchell (Connick, Jr.).

Much of the film deals with Lucy's discomfort and her adjustment to the earnestness of the community who gradually warm to her after a fashion. Her first meeting with Ted ends with her insulting him and reducing him to a red neck stereotype. She's forced to eat crow when Ted visits her office the following morning and begins to address the union's concerns. Hanging over everything is the fact that the cooperation wants to lose half the employees which Lucy finds difficult to implement. So there is tension which explodes when the order comes down that the plant will be closed. Then a set of circumstances that are truly obvious unravel and Lucy magically saves the plant and everyone's job.

Lucy is a haughty bitch who looks downward from her lofty perch at the simpletons who make up the small community in which she is unceremoniously thrust. Naturally, she learns the error of her ways and comes to appreciate the townsfolk for what they are. There are numerous scenes where Lucy is forced to deal with life as it is lived for these regular people who are all tied to the plant in some fashion or another. Her romance with Ted is predictable and not particularly satisfying. It's just a plot device that these sort of film always necessitate. Lucy is completed only with a man as her rabid climb to the top of the corporate ladder is deemed to reflect badly on her character. What is important here are the values of small time America against the tyrannical and systematic evil as represented by the corporations who reduce people to statistical data that can easily be shifted around without feeling.

The film is focused on a romance that doesn't come across as particularly stimulating in the final analysis. It's generic and unenergetic. The

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