Uptown Girls: a classless act

Okay, stop me if you've heard this one before.

So, two blondes, a brunette, and a black man walk into a nightclub...and then someone dies. The end. That's it. No story, no punchline, no hysterical laughter to follow. Thus goes Uptown Girls. This film may seek to be a modern day fairy tale but more closely resembles a bar joke that everyone's heard a million times and only the drunken teller slumping over his tenth beer finds amusing.

Perhaps this movie could have pulled its emotional strings despite its trite premise if it hadn't been so confused as to its audience and genre. After all, I still laughed along with 10 Things I Hate About You despite the fact that it was simply She's All That with blondes and Aussies. But with too much crying to be a comedy, too much slapstick to be a drama, and too much sex to appeal to small children (the only possible audience for this film), Uptown Girls needs some kind of oomph, quirk, or pizzazz to charm audiences. But being so relentlessly by-the-books and so outrageously blonde only serves to weigh down an already flop-worthy film.

Brittany Murphy (who forgot to schluff off all her excess eye shadow from Don't Say a Word) is Molly Gunn, the perpetually five- but actually 22-year-old daughter of a deceased 80s rock icon. Dakota Fanning is Ray Schleine, a 40-year-old hypochondriac crammed uncomfortably into the body of a gently lisping 8-year-old ballerina. When Molly is conned out of her inherited fortune, she is forced to seek work for the first time in her life and becomes saddled with the undesirable occupation of nanny to Ray. Thrown together by circumstance, the two bond over dead fathers and spinning teacups and teach the other to act their age, not their shoe size.

Actually, the cutesy relationship between Molly and Ray turns out to be an elaborate façade for the film's true purpose: to get Molly and Neal (Jesse Spencer), an Australian "rock-and-roll-poet-sex-god" (Molly's words, not mine) in bed together or at least out of their clothing as much as possible. Expecting to see a story about cross-generational bonding between young girls, I was instead sneakily duped into watching shallow people in designer jackets try and get into each other's pants. And if Murphy's Molly is dislikable in her own vapid, Britney-Spears-acid-trippy way, she's nothing compared to Neal. Between ignoring Molly's calls and sleeping with music maven Roma Schleine (Heather Locklear) to get a record deal, it's hard to imagine what Molly sees in him. Maybe it's the accent.

Director Boaz Yakin would have done better to focus on Donald Faison as Huey, Molly's friend and a producer for Roma. Like on the television comedy Scrubs, any scene with Faison radiates energy, and he has the best comedic timing and delivery of any actor in the film. Only with him does Murphy ever really seem comfortable—not surprising, considering that the two worked together eight years ago on the teen satire Clueless. But Yakin is no stranger to sap—his last directing project was Remember the Titans—and since the scenes with Huey and Molly don't ooze like a pine tree, they are few and far between.

As Ray, Fanning is too over-the-top adultish and rarely seems natural when speaking her precocious dialogue. Her forced delivery isn't as bad as some of her lines, however. With a distressing tendency to call people "freaks" and give them the middle finger, Ray is too grown up in more ways than one. As for Murphy, well, at one pivotal moment Molly realizes that she's missing Ray's all-important, all-consuming, all-everything ballet recital. "God, I have to get over there," Murphy gasps with all the urgency most people reserve for saying, "God, I have to wash my socks." That she's not up to playing a ritzy, pop-culture princess isn't a good sign for Murphy's career, considering that taking this role seems to be typecasting.

To be fair, however, Molly's characterization itself is somewhat dicey and ambiguous. The script for Uptown Girls is a quadruple effort by Julia Dahl, Lisa Davidowitz, Mo Ogrodnik, and Allison Jacobs, and it's entirely possible that at no point in the writing process did any of them read what the others had written. Molly is full of bizarre, inexplicable contradictions. She throws away thousands of dollars on hideous orange bedsheets yet seems distressed when Ray wastes paper towels. In one breath she staunchly defends the rainforest while in the next she mocks her charge for eating tofu instead of beef; apparently Molly's ecological awareness doesn't extend to the dangers of cattle farming to the rainforest. Supposedly broke and streamlining her life, Molly's endless supply of fashion ware could easily fill a few issues of Vogue. Why it took four people to lay down this muck is beyond me; perhaps that's where all the money went that could have been used to hire an acting coach.

Uptown Girls has its comedic moments, mostly of the slapstick variety. Molly's clumsy escapades in Ray's sterile home are always good for a chuckle, but nothing in this movie incites any kind of full-blown, on-the-floor laughter. Beginning with nothing and building to nothing, Uptown Girls floats along, oblivious to its own shallow pretentiousness, until it ends, unsurprisingly, in nothing.

Uptown Girls is rated PG-13 for sexual content and language.