Movies into Film
Jersey Girl
Directed by Kevin Smith
USA, 2004
J-Lo Dies! (Lucky Her)
Affleck and Lopez (Photo: Miramax)
Our culture tells us we can now laugh at anything, yet can we? Can we laugh at the state of film comedy when intentionally dramatic moments often trigger more gales than the presumed hilarity? In Jersey Girl, Ben Affleck waves his infant daughter’s soiled diaper around, and I am truly sorry for you if that tickles your funny bone. In the same scene, the delusional and sophomoric writer-director Kevin Smith pulls in for a close-up of said infant’s tiny exposed crotch. We’re meant to laugh at the mound of baby powder in which papa Affleck has nearly buried her, but the choice of shots seems uncomfortably close to child pornography.
Smith does nearly everything wrong, from his flat appropriations of Woody Allen-esque one-liners (i.e. Affleck tells Liv Tyler that she could get “carpal tunnel syndrome from masturbation”) to straining credibility past another biological breaking point. After the baby’s mother expires in childbirth, it never occurs to Smith that this newborn would need a wet nurse. (Two men raise her alone in her first few weeks.) Or that Affleck, who plays the sort of parvenu for whom lattes and laptops are not merely second but first nature, could very well have hired a nanny rather than haul his diaper change needing bambina into a Manhattan publicity junket. Ah, but you say, then we’d be deprived of all the predictable pandemonium that people go to the movies for.
Smith succeeds on two agenda items. One, he handles the hospital death scene of Jennifer Lopez, which takes place about 10 minutes in, with all the heart he can muster. Two, he caps the film with a genuinely hilarious staging of Sweeney Todd as an elementary school pageant. Yet too much of Jersey Girl treads the same old schmaltz mill. Before becoming a better parent, the careerist heel Affleck must be brought low to learn about life and love, or what passes for them in commercial cinema. He must base major life decisions entirely on sentiment, and when has anybody who made such choices ever amounted to anything? In the closing frames, Smith implies that he actually believes in the tired conventions he’s hawking: he displays an on-screen dedication to and a photograph of his real-life father who died in 2003. The caption below reads, “I miss you, Pop.” – NPT
February 2004
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com