If all of this seems redolent of My Best Friend's Wedding, the twinship cannot be accidental.
This is not a leave-a-forwarding address kind of girl. After Andrew proposes marriage in a gaga and surreptitiously tawdry sequence in Tiffany's (from the get go, the wedding ring symbolizes something Melanie gets to choose, not something she feels or welcomes), she hikes back to Alabama to "clear up some issues from her past"by herself, for an indefinite period, with no specifics provided.
That's all way before the movie begins, but then again it isn't, because the proper plot commences with a virtual duplication of the same gesture, just geographically reversed. And so she leaves not just Jake, her teenaged husband, but her parents (Mary Kay Place and Fred Ward), her friends (including Ethan Embry andshe's back! Heavenly Creatures' Melanie Lynskey), and all of her acquaintances in Pigeon Creek, Alabama, without a word. She is skittish about promises and responsibility, and she seems immediately suspicious of happinessto include the happiness of others, which she often works by reflex to dismantle. That fault is named Melanie, and Sweet Home Alabama makes clear early on that she has no one but herself to blame for her conundrums. They are for the most part, albeit in their own ways, graceful to a fault. By contrast, Sweet Home Alabama refreshingly allows both Andrew and Jake to be reasonably charming, sincere, and well-intentioned, and in fact, when one or the other slips into recognizably human lapses of compassion or judgment, they swiftly recoup these errors and avoid being branded Permanently Unfit. Right, it's just a thank-goodness escape from legions of obvious Mr. The eventual union in "romances" like these isn't with Mr. It is all too often that Hollywood movies about amorous "choice" seal the deal by disqualifying one of the contendersor even, as Kissing Jessica Stein reminds us, by pre-empting an entire gender (not because they're men, but because they sneeze, wear silk, use calculators). In telling the would-be larkish story of fashion designer Melanie Carmichael (Reese Witherspoon) and her competing romantic commitments to Andrew Hennings (Patrick Dempsey), the upscale, dashing son of the mayor of New York City, and Jake Perry (Josh Lucas), the hardy, dashing quarterback sweetheart she abandoned in a tearful huff seven years ago, Sweet Home Alabama refuses to make either fellow a jerk, a bully, a viper, or a control freak. Sweet Home Alabama can't make choices, which is sometimes a good thing, but more often isn't. Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, Ethan Embry, Candice Bergin, Mary Kay Place, Fred Ward, Jean Smart, Melanie Lynskey, Dakota Fanning, Nathan Lee Graham.