27 Dresses

Aline Brosh McKenna got several nominations for her screenplay of The Devil Wears Prada, a film with no great pretensions but a cackling mix of Meryl Streep as a ruthless, ambitious editor of a fashion magazine and Anne Hathaway as her naïve, wide-eyed assistant.

In 27 Dresses, McKenna hopes to repeat the magic, this time working with her own story. The settings are somewhat similar — as in there is an editor as sure of her own authority, and a junior who wants to do something different, operating in a world where image counts as much as the real thing.

However, there is none of the tension, the contest, the expected but still anticipated resolution that sparkled in The Devil Wears Prada. 27 Dresses gets nothing out of the closet that makes you sit up and say “Wow!”.

Along the lines of a romantic comedy where two apparently opposite people meet, clash, spend a fun evening where they discover they are not that different followed by a night together, immediately followed by a catastrophe, separation, only to meet again, the film follows a pattern and doesn’t leave out a stitch.

Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy) is Jane, who had an epiphany when she was eight that she loved weddings and has since been to 27 of them as a bridesmaid. Obviously, she hopes one day she will be a bride herself, but till then she is happy organising weddings for others, down to fixing up the cake, picking up their wedding gowns and later holding these up when the brides need to pee in the middle of the ceremony.

James Marsden is Kevin/Malcolm Doyle, a journalist for The New York Journal who covers society weddings for the paper. Having been to as many of them as Jane, he obviously sees it all as an industry that survives on exploiting people when they are at their most gullible.

Jane is oblivious to all this and, of course, to Kevin till her kid sister swishes into town and swishes away her boss, who Jane imagines herself to be in love with. It’s time for Sweet, and thankfully not Plain, Jane to assert and speak for herself.

While Heigl should have grabbed what is her first major motion picture with both hands, she is on her guard, perhaps as clueless as we as to how an intelligent, very attractive woman could have such a strange interest.

While she says certain things, her eyes tell you something different, that she herself doesn’t quite fall for Jane’s fascination for being “always the bridesmaid, never the bride”, and for retaining— what she calls— “hideous” dresses from her 27 appearances as a bridesmaid. She repeatedly tells Kevin “You won’t understand”, but neither does anyone else.

Only Marsden, who is perfecting himself as an actor waiting for the heroine to notice her, saves 27 Dresses from sinking. While his dishevelled journalist look may be overdone, considering he covers weddings, he at least has the charm to sweep a bride off her feet. What chance stands a woman who lives to be one?