HOLLYWOOD HUES
Absorbing fare

The complicated plot of My Mom’s Boyfriend makes up for the trite beginning and
it ends up as a complete entertainer, writes Ervell E. Menezes

THIS new trend of separated women falling for younger men (may be it started with Mrs Robinson) is fast growing and is reflected in My Mom’s New Boyfriend where you have a 100 pounds lighter, feisty Marty (Meg Ryan) having a whole new attitude to life much to the surprise and often embarrassment of her son Henry (Colin Hanks), an FBI agent.

Henry has just returned home after three years with his fianc`E9e Emily (Selma Blair), who instantly takes to her prospective ma-in-law. Wooing Marty is a teenager younger than Henry and a middle-aged Italian chef. But it is Tommy (Antonio Banderas), a dubious arts aficionado, who has his eyes set on a Bemini sculpture in Louvre (so the action takes place in happening Paris but you don’t hear the sirens) whom she settles for.

But there’s a hitch because Henry heads a team assigned to protect that art work. It is, then, large-scale bugging that would have made former US President Richard Nixon blush. But the worst part of the exercise is that Henry has to listen to his motherlove-cooing and heavy breathing.

May be the film begins rather tritely with this inner self-cleansed mom (a trip to India is part of the healing) overdoing her thing and this could well have been edited but the logistics of the heist and the complicated plot gives it a fresh impetus. Modern technology imbues it with a sophisticated edge when compared with oldies like Topkapi and How to Steal a Million and makes the fare even absorbing.

The halting English of Banderas is amusing even if it slows down the pace but Meg Ryan is her usual gutsy self as she displays her infinite versatility. Colin Hanks as the confused, enigmatic son gives evidence of a comic talent while Selma Blair is essentially academic, sort of filling in the blanks.

But this less-than-100-minute-drama grows on you and just when one wonders how it will end, a dramatic twist does it. And one comes out of the cinema satiated. No, it’s not something exceptional but in the light of today’s Hollywood famine it is even wholesome. After all don’t we know of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

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