Movie No. 21: "Sex and the City"

As a caveat to this review let me note from the beginning, I've seen a total of maybe five or six episodes of the TV show "Sex and the City." Maybe you need to have watched the show religiously for the movie to really work. But from the perspective of someone who didn't, to see such a drab film made from HBO's second most famous series is something of a disappointment.

As the film begins, Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie is apartment hunting with longtime on-again-off-again flame Mr. Big (an incredibly bored-looking Chris Noth), and the process of moving in together leads them toward walking down the aisle together. And of course, that draws together her girlfriends Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall). Loves are lost and found. Friendships are hurt and rehabilitated. The problem is, with the exception of the one storyline that really works, it all simply feels lukewarm or extraneous.

Part of the problem is the film's central relationship. I'm assuming, given the rather iconic nature of their on-screen pairing, that at one point Parker and Noth had actual chemistry. The professions of love sound half-hearted. Even before events conspire to rip apart the dream wedding, the pair seem ill-at-ease together. Being told by the script they were meant to be, but not really feeling it themselves.

This might not have been fatal, except that two of the other three friends are given little to do. For most of the film Davis simply drags her adopted daughter around and chirps indignities. Cattrall, whose storyline about trying not to cheat on her boyfriend with a new neighbor takes place mostly in California, seems so extraneous here that her character could have pretty much been excised completely without doing anything except making the movie shorter.

When two of your film's only memorable scenes are music montages, something is wrong.

The lone light comes from Nixon's Miranda. Her storyline about a marriage on the rocks through infidelity and neglect is moving, and her performance is so powerful that it seems as though it would be more at home in one of Nicole Holofcener's wonderful female-driven films than one otherwise struggling to find either its comedic or dramatic way. Unfortunately Nixon, and, to a lesser degree, Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's assistant, can only do so much for a film that never seems able to build any momentum.

C