New In Town (2009)

New in Town is a warmly affectionate and humorous tale of love and community spirit set in the winter wonderland (or frigid wasteland) of Minnesota. The movie didn't linger long at the box office and it took longer than expected to arrive on DVD, probably because half the country has no interest in frozen tundra and the 45 states that are not Minnesota or its neighbors have little interest in "yah, sure, yew betcha" country. The folksy Minnesota dialect here is authentic yet understated -- not acerbically omnipresent as in Fargo -- and the soundtrack is rich in Celtic and alt-rock tunes. The dialog is mostly clean (just a handful of coarse words), small-town midwestern values are strong, and the Christian faith is supportively represented. Our story begins as Lucy (Renee Zellweger), a driven executive on the CEO track in Miami, starts her day running then commuting to a meeting where she is assigned to fly out the next day and radically downsize a food-processing plant in New Ulm, Minnesota. (I love New Ulm, home of Schell's Brewery, but filming was actually in Winnepeg, Manitoba.) She arrives in the dead of winter with no winter wear, which is played to comic effect. (Her flippant "How bad could it be?" before venturing outdoors becomes a "Holy mother--!" tirade that is cut off by the airport's automatic doors. Later, upon arriving as a guest for a home-cooked meal on her first evening in town, she spies in the bathroom mirror why her hosts thought she might be "a little cold.") Pratfalls in the snow and ice occur in due season even as Renee's corporate "monkey" buzzwords fall on deaf ears. She even gets off to a bad start with the union boss (Harry Connick Jr.) but they eventually come to a meeting of the minds (and more). (I had only two concerns: a parent getting caught "offsides" after ensuring his daughter would come home at 10:30 pm with her virtue intact on prom night and Renee's increasingly bizarre complexion -- her face looked like it had gone through barbed wire during the second half of the movie.) Renee gradually warms up to the town and things get hunky dory. Whimsical elements of the script include six townswomen's "scrapping" klatsch, where their dialect and scrapbooking handicraft receive sympathetic treatment, plus tubs and tubs of tapioca and (in the deleted scenes) several sneaky gnome-sized "trolls." (Two-thirds of the many deleted scenes were rightly deleted but I would argue that keeping the troll scenes would have given this movie an even quirkier charm that might have won over a borderline cult fan following.) If you like Grumpier Old Men and Kitchen Stories then you will likely enjoy New in Town. 4.5 stars. (5-29-09)