Sweet Home Alabama

SYNOPSIS

The satirical edge that Reese Witherspoon displayed in Election is blunted by too much Legally Blonde-style kitsch in this negligible romantic comedy. She plays a New York-residing, Alabama-raised fashion designer who needs a divorce from her childhood sweetheart in order to marry socialite Patrick Dempsey. So Witherspoon heads home, bristling with snobbish attitude, only to step into a corny Dixieland fantasy that seems manufactured to take her down a peg or two as well as blind her to the problems that caused her to abandon husband Josh Lucas in the first place. Director Andy Tennant managed more realism in his Cinderella story Ever After, but the charming Witherspoon almost manages to make us care about yet another Identikit big-city caricature.