Picture Perfect *** (1997, Jennifer Aniston, Jay Mohr, Kevin Bacon) – Classic Movie Review 1900

Co-writer/director Glenn Gordon Caron’s 1997 romantic comedy is alas not a perfect picture, but it is still an amiable and easy-going vehicle for Jennifer Aniston, with enough smiles and laughs to make it very tolerable.

Thanks to her improbable casting, Aniston is hard stretched to be believable as a thrusting, ambitious yuppie ad director called Kate Mosley, who works in the Mercer advertising agency, where she fancies the office wolf (Kevin Bacon). Because she’s inconveniently single, Kate is passed up for promotion because she is ‘not stable enough’.

So, to succeed in business, she pretends to be engaged and makes up a fake fiancé to impress her boss, Mr Mercer (Kevin Dunn). Then she talks wimpy Nick (Jay Mohr), a man she has just met at a friend’s wedding, into taking on the role for an important function, with expected farcical results.

As all the Friends cast have found, these movies are as difficult to do as to make the transition from TV to the big screen. But the charming and amusing Aniston does well, even if her persona is stretched in the cinema and she’s got nothing new to offer here that she doesn’t show weekly on Friends.

Director Glenn Gordon Caron, who created Moonlighting, spins a yarn that has all the deficiencies but none of the allure of the ancient Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies. How could Aniston not get her teeth into Bacon? This bland script should have been cured. Nevertheless, this sometimes strained romantic comedy has its moments. Aniston is appealing, Mohr is loyal in support and Bacon is amusing, cast against type as a smarmy git.

Olympia Dukakis, Ileana Douglas and Anne Twomey also star.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1900

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