`Picture Perfect” is a vacuous-sounding title. But it’s a fit description for the vacuous movie it announces: a sleek piffle filled with knock-out gorgeous but terminally shallow people, an imitation comedy done in perfectly composed pictures that suggest ad layouts.
Sometimes a film or book can seem secretly infatuated with the very ideas and people it ostensibly attacks. And “Picture Perfect” often seems as besotted with the hype, crookedness and glamor — and superficiality — of the Madison Avenue advertising world it portrays, as the movie’s Kate Mosley (Jennifer Aniston) and Darcy O’Neal (Illeana Douglas) do in the beginning. These two are at their most convincing when standing beneath a Calvin Klein billboard on Broadway, screaming about their shallow dreams of designing TV Super Bowl spots.
Shallow dreams are all the movie has to offer. In this so-called romantic comedy, Aniston (the come-hither Rachel of TV’s “Friends”) is a rising young advertising director who dreams up a “brilliant” campaign for Gulden’s Mustard — and then finds herself fighting for her job by telling lie after lie to her easily conned bosses: cynical Mr. Mercer (Kevin Dunn) and boorish Mr. Rothman (Jim Davenport).
Lies and lying are the heart of the story here — as they are in many romantic comedies. But how bosses this gullible ever rose so high in the supposedly cutthroat advertising world is one of “Picture’s” many unsolved mysteries.
Kate’s advancement is stalled, we’re told, because Mercer prefers married, engaged or heavily indebted employees to single young women. So Kate and her devious mentor Darcy use a recent staged wedding snapshot of guest Kate with Bostonian video director Nick (Jay Mohr) to concoct a phony engagement between them. The plotters are forced to improvise further when Nick suddenly becomes headline-famous for a heroic rescue and Kate’s deceived bosses want to dine with him.
This proves easy to arrange, since Nick is an affable guy with an instantaneous major crush on Kate. But, because he’s in love with her, he’s not as amenable to her entire plan: a fake argument and breakup at a restaurant dinner in front of three married bosses. And that’s crucial to Kate, because it will leave her unengaged — and free to pursue her own major crush on office stud Sam Mayfair (Kevin Bacon).
On and on it goes, a promising idea slipping and sliding into nonsense. The movie and its writers, including director Glenn Gordon Caron (director of “Clean and Sober” and the Warren Beatty “Love Affair,” and the writer-producer of TV’s “Moonlighting”), want us to believe, at least for a while, that there’s some kind of conflict between love and careerism going on here. They want us to buy the idea that poor Kate has gotten into a fix because her head tells her to cater to her bosses, while her heart finally inclines her toward true love with Nick.
But, even if you can swallow this stupefying story and its half-baked logic, how can you take seriously a movie about romantic idealism vs. corporate gamesmanship that uses for its fictitious campaign a real mustard company, Gulden’s (with obviously huge product placement benefits), and then sells Jennifer Aniston as hard as she’s selling the mustard?
In scene after scene, the camera prowls Aniston’s now famous body as if she were a geological phenomenon, exploring every nook and cranny revealed by her low-decolletage, high-hem dresses and skirts. After a while, males in the audience may have trouble focusing on what she’s saying, even in the simplest and stupidest conversations — of which there are many in “Picture Perfect.”
And though this might have made sense if she were playing the office sexpot, Kate is supposed to be a “good girl,” an Audrey Hepburn type, a wallflower (!), a semi-plain Jane whom her exasperated mom (Olympia Dukakis) has been trying to strong-arm into matrimony. We’re supposed to believe that office stud Sam won’t date Kate at first, because he thinks she’s “too good” (!!) a girl for him.
Looking at Aniston — who can stop traffic no matter how bad her scripts are — it’s hard to understand why Kate’s superiors can criticize her for not projecting a stable (married) image and then beam approval at her new wardrobe of slit-between-the-cleavage slinky sheaths, half-open blouses and hip-hugging skirts. This is stability?
But then it’s practically impossible to figure out why anybody is doing anything in “Picture Perfect.” Why does Kate’s mom, Rita (played by Oscar-winning Dukakis), act like a shrieking Long Island harridan? Why does Kate think her bosses will be impressed favorably if she stages a screaming breakup with her phony fiance in a crowded restaurant? And why are they impressed when she does?
And, in the avalanche of humiliations dumped on Nick by Kate during their brief relationship, what exactly has he found about her to fall in love with (other than her “Rachel” hairdo and her cleavage)?
As it is, Kate seems shallow and self-absorbed, not just in the beginning, but all the way to the imitation “Graduate” break-up-the-wedding-ceremony finale. Aniston is lucky to have Mohr, Bacon and Douglas, who all bring a certain truth or humor to their parts that the script mostly lacks. Mohr, who was believably slick and slimy as Tom Cruise’s rival agent Bob Sugar in “Jerry Maguire,” is believably good-hearted here. But perhaps Bacon — who at least gets a few more degrees for games of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” — is the only real winner.
Caron was an ex-advertising man himself. And maybe his Madison Avenue years taught him a little too well how to sell things — the spurious as well as the classy. “Picture Perfect” tries to trick us into thinking it’s a caviar comedy — a screwball delight, a wise and witty romp, another “Graduate” — but the ruse doesn’t work. It’s just another Hollywood counterfeit that can’t cut the mustard.
”PICTURE PERFECT”
(star) 1/2
Directed by Glenn Gordon Caron; written by Arleen Sorkin, Paul Slansky, Caron; photographed by Paul Sarossy; edited by Robert Reitano; production designed by Larry Fulton; music by Carter Burwell; produced by Erwin Stoff. A 20th Century Fox release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:40. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Kate Mosley ………………. Jennifer Aniston
Nick …………………….. Jay Mohr
Sam Mayfair ………………. Kevin Bacon
Rita Mosley ………………. Olympia Dukakis
Darcy O’Neal ……………… Illeana Douglas
Mr. Mercer ……………….. Kevin Dunn
