How to Deal is down in the dumps

Mandy Moore Barbie comes in two unique personalities, each distinguishable solely by hairstyle. Pop princess Mandy is a blonde. She wears short skirts and low-cut tank tops and misses you like candy. Angsty actress Mandy is a brunette. She, too, wears short skirts and low-cut tank tops, but they're angry tank tops, and her skirts cry, "Take me seriously!" In How to Deal, Mandy tries oh-so-desperately to convince the world that she's troubled, anguished, and a brunette. But just like Skipper is Barbie in a wig, we know that Angst Mandy is just Pop Mandy with a new hairdresser. Mandy Moore is naturally blonde and naturally bubbly, and acting is not her natural calling.

As Halley Martin, the in-search-of-an-attitude disaffected protagonist of How to Deal, Mandy guides the all-encompassing blahness that screenwriter Neena Beber mistook for plot on a tour of chick flick clichés and shallow trivialities. (Among the "challenges" of life that the film's website lists is "shopping.") How to Deal reads like the pilot episode for a bad soap opera, all set to the shinier, happier stylings of Liz Phair. After her father, a popular radio DJ, divorces her mother and runs off with a silicon-enhanced bimbo, Halley embraces the cynical side of life, becoming a non-believer in love. Of course, this demands that a similarly talent-devoid piece of eye candy, Macon Forrester (Trent Ford), suddenly express his desire to have her for his very own. Coincidence? More like contrivance. After all, where's the angst if Macon had asked her out before her parents' divorce?

But godforbid only Halley and Macon get to participate in this sophomoric woe-fest. Her best friend Scarlett (Alexandra Holden) is pregnant with the child of her dead boyfriend, and Halley's sister Ashley (Mary Catherine Garrison) is getting married to a three-piece suit with whom she constantly bickers. Neither of these subplots intersects in any meaningful way with the primary "romance." They operate as completely independent portions of Halley's life—whenever one storyline reaches a dead-end, Halley hops over to the next one. Sketchy months-long time lapses eliminate the need for transitions.

Slovenly writing isn't the only shoddy aspect of How to Deal. For a romance to be interesting, the characters need to be engaging and developed. Our knowledge of Halley and Macon is limited to their favorite lip-gloss and choice hair gel. When Halley says to Macon, "The quickest way to ruin a relationship with someone is to try to have a relationship," she implies that the two have some sort of association. Whatever their past together was, it's never alluded to again, as director Clare Kilner would rather watch them smooch than talk. But why Halley would want to kiss the incessantly brooding Macon is beyond me. Think of a shorter Anakin Skywalker from Attack of the Clones with funkier eyebrows and two extra helpings of hair grease, and you have Macon, a slimy git who won't take "grow up" for an answer.

When she feels that the melodrama-meter of her life is falling, Halley purposefully adds some more. Like similarly love-afflicted characters in other teen films, like 10 Things I Hate About You and She's All That, Halley baselessly lashes out at her parents. It's a hackneyed concept—the poor adolescent misunderstood by her authority figures—and an idea with no grounds in this movie. Despite the fact that Halley readily spends hours griping about her father to both her mother and her friends, when the gods of self-pity call for it she's only too willing to accuse her mother of being "too busy hating dad to listen."

Allison Janney (The West Wing) as Halley's mother is the only member of this ensemble who seems to realize just how ridiculous this piece of sodden trash is. Embittered and hostile, Janney provides the few humorous moments of How to Deal, once when she is recording a video of herself for an online dating service that becomes a tirade against the male species, and later, when venting her woes while gardening, she sits back with a look of horrified resignation and realizes, "Oh my god, I'm talking to my plants!" But Janney's Emmy-award-winning talents are mostly wasted on this mindless blather.

Mandy should be sent back to the recording studio (something I never thought I'd say), Janney should return to television, and Ford shoud be banished to the depths of nonentity from whence he came to spare us another pathetic look on how life would be if the collective IQ of humanity dropped 100 points. Cry me a river, drown me a kitten, just spare me all the misery.