Product: Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
Rating: 2.0
Every cliche Under The Tuscan Sun.
Suffering a rank case of postmodern personality disorder - dead split between traditional and avant-garde mores - "Under The Tuscan Sun" seeks to embrace its main character, a divorced writer reinventing her life along with a villa in the Italian hills, and then poke fun at her, doling out equal amounts of ladybugs and Fellini. It plays a basic genre con, pretending to be a Travel Picture while its main trade is the same movie-of-the-week dramatics Lisa Hartman has been gnashing her teeth over for years.Diane Lane, in an apology for her brave, sexy performance in "Unfaithful," is Frances Mayes, jilted and unmoored on a gay tour of Italy (set up by her gay friend, played by Sandra Oh) while writing esteemed lines on postcards such as "ding, dang, dong, the bell rang" and stumbling upon a house and garden ripe for remodeling, and her entire bank account.Writer/director Audrey Wells doesn't particularly consider this villa with her camera; we get glimpses of rooms, a concept of the garden, but Lane never presented in anything but regal close-up. There are obligatory, Remember-It's-Tuscany helicopter shots, but the movie's two most impressive visuals - a sunset on the beach and Florence at dawn - are special f/x, blue screen manipulations. Shameless.But Wells isn't out for an American version of "Enchanted April." She is, however, offering the full tour of women's issues: divorce (in her book by the same name, Mayes refurbishes the villa with her husband), pregnancy, forbidden young love, sex, kind married men, swarthy younger men, silent older men who leave flowers at alters for no apparent reason, and finally, famous movie directors, say Federico Fellini, who apparently thought a great deal of all things child - enthusiasm, innocence, naivete, stupidity. Fellini is dead, but his wisdom is channeled through a goofy blonde bombshell who poses nude for a painting one afternoon while drinking tea with nuns the next morning.There are dreams about white dresses, mewling kitties (did Wells mistake Fellini for Luis Bunuel?) flag-tossing expeditions, days in the olive fields, thunderstorms, snakes, signs from God via pigeons and a motorcycle ride through a seaside resort. The motorcycle ride, featuring Lane done up to the nines, is a particularly odd scene, considering the joke laid at Frances' feet by the end of that ride.But "Under The Tuscan Sun" is full of such contrasts, vesting in Frances' want to have and find love, then exposing the quest as fraud, as if to be a grind of feminist theory Frances must survive before passing out the other side and meeting a servile, unworthy guy in the movie's final five minutes - literally - as if that God of thunderstorms and ladybugs sent him through Tuscany as reward.Lane is appealing and gorgeous but she mugs as badly as Meg Ryan on Theatre Sunday; her face pops and seethes and scowls and explodes in happiness and, quite often, settles on a bizarre, quizzical frown unbecoming of a woman in her late thirties, who should have figured a few things out by now. Frances is written as vulnerable, and Lane hits that mark with an obviousness that's meant to be funny; at times it works, at others Lane just shambles around. Yes, she's capable enough of opening and carrying a movie, if that was the point, but Lane need not play a half-witted fourth fiddle in Julia Roberts country just to avoid the tagalong role in Keanu Reeves sports films.For Wells, who had wrote "The Truth About Cats and Dogs" and "Guinevere," the failure is not surprising: Frankly, she's skilled in relationship territory, hapless otherwise. "Under The Tuscan Sun" mines the same ridiculous "in a foreign land, everyone's a kook!" material beaten to pulp - in fact, Europeans are not half as juiced up and loud as Americans - while teaching its lesson on What Women Should Want.Bizarre, right-angled stuff like recreating the fountain scene from Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" speaks to Wells' arrogance and true aim - only a small portion of the audience, and hardly anyone under forty, will have the foggiest idea what that scene is, or was, about. Whether it was a pander to the arthouse crowd or a tack at smartening up the target audience, it's an ugly bit of filmmaking in a picture full of nose-cutting and face-spiting.