SOMETHING BORROWED

Rating: 1

SOMETHING BORROWED, based on the chick-lit novel of the same name by Emily Giffiin, does nothing to advance the case for the genre’s existence. Though breathlessly caught up in the lives of women in nice shoes dithering about what they should do with their lives, it never approaches being as interesting as those shoes, certainly its planning, execution, and construction never approaches the excellence of a Manolo. Or the places those shoes take them to. The mad whirl of trendy night spots, restaurants, and, this being set in New York City, sunny weekends in the Hamptons is just so much attractive framework for the final showdown between lifelong friends neither of whose company is interesting enough to make it matter.
This being chick-lit, Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin), the smart, cute friend suddenly finds herself beating out Darcy (Kate Hudson), her ditzy, hot friend, for the affections of the latter’s even hotter fiance, Dex (Colin Egglesfield), and, of course, without even trying. Well, maybe just a little. A semi-drunken confession from Rachel to Dex about having had a crush on him when they were both in law school leads to sloppy smooching in the back seat of a taxi, and something even sloppier back at Rachel’s apartment. Naturally, they both feel guilty. Naturally, they don’t want to hurt Darcy. Naturally, it’s not lust, it’s true love. Naturally, Rachel is going to take an inordinate amount of time confiding in her other childhood friend, Ethan (John Kraskinski), about what the right thing to do is. Ethan is going to listen while being obviously in love with Rachel his own self, something no one else notices, and finally, when he can’t take her dithering anymore, throw the hissy fit at Rachel that the audience has wanted to throw for several reels.
While nothing could have saved this hot mess, casting Kraskinski as a character whose function is to react sardonically to the silliness around him almost makes the scenes he’s in bearable. It’s his peculiar genius, mixing the trappings of good humor with the deeply felt hostility Ethan feels for everyone else in the film to a greater or lesser degree. He’s the ideal audience stand-in. Goodwin, to be fair, puts her heart and soul into a character, alas, it is a character that is only a few microns thick, and even at that (lack of) depth, Rachel is still light-years more evolved than either the self-absorbed Darcy, to whom Hudson can bring little of the humor required, or Dex. Perhaps it isn’t entirely Egglesfield’s fault, what with Dex being written as little more than a handsomely carved, heavily lacquered, block of wood. Subplots in which Rachel and Ethan are tossed in harm’s way, as in fending off unwelcome advances from clueless idiots add to the general sense of wasted time, particularly a wild-eyed stalker (Ashley Williams) with whom Ethan, to everyone’s chagrin, has had a meaningless fling. There is no overcoming the pathetic quality of her relentless pursuit of a totally disinterested Ethan, and the attempt late in the flick‘s action to imbue her actions with a nobility on a par with the quest for the Holy Grail does nothing to elevate the former while somehow cheapening the latter.
The only laughs in SOMETHING BORROWED are of the derisive, unintended variety. Dense where it should be high-spirited, plodding where it should be sprightly, and obsessed far more with the glitzy locations and hip apparel than on anything happening in them, it starts with a yawn and falls apart with a dull doggedness that defies explanation.