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'Perfect Man' tells imperfect story
Chris Noth and Hilary Duff
Universal Studios
Director: Mark Rosman
Stars: Hilary Duff, Heather Locklear, Chris Noth
MPAA rating: PG, for some mildly suggestive content
It hardly pretends to be more than an urban fairy tale. But finally, it is too transparently reliant on pointless contrivances, criminally convenient solutions and irritating interruptions.
Its target audience of girls from maybe 10 to 18 years old might not mind how glib and gooey it is and how second-hand it feels. At least, given for whom it's intended, it's wholesome.
Gina Wendkos' screenplay flirts with mature content -- a mother who apparently never married, a flirtatious gay bartender named Lance (Carson Kressley) -- but stays within the perimeters of a PG rating.
Well-intentioned mom Jean Hamilton (Heather Locklear) chooses lovers badly and jumps from one part of the country to another each time she's discarded by her latest loser.
As the film begins, she's moving back to Brooklyn with idealized daughters Holly (Hilary Duff), 16, and Zoe (Aria Wallace), 7.
Just to keep Mom from uprooting them again too quickly, Holly, who likens herself to a gypsy in a witness-protection program, invents for Mom a secret admirer who sends notes, e-mails and flowers and even phones once.
Eventually, a suitor will have to materialize. Goofus baker Lenny Horton (Mike O'Malley) inadvertently steps into the role.
Holly would prefer the part go to Ben Cooper (Chris Noth), the bachelor uncle of new best friend Amy Pearl (Vanessa Lengies). Holly needs Amy's help, as well as that of classmate Adam Forrest (Ben Feldman), to maintain the charade.
Considering how warm and marriageable Jean seems to everyone in the audience, the "Cyrano de Bergerac" plot and the compounding fibs syndrome becomes more annoying than it is amusing. The foundation for it is too flimsy.
"The Perfect Man" regularly reinforces a pattern of characters being interrupted every time something is about to get sorted out.
Director Mark Rosman, who also did Duff's "A Cinderella Story," seems to find it amusing that objects keep getting knocked over.
Patches of the picture are comparatively well written, including Holly's narration of the journal she's keeping in her computer.
But while they were filming in Toronto with a cast lacking New York authenticity, no one seems to have noticed that no character sounds as if he or she has spent even 10 minutes in the American borough with the most distinctive accent.
