Hail to Mandy Moore, if not to this tale of president's daughter
Today was to have been a major event for Hollywood movies about self-sufficient daughters of presidents. In one corner was Katie Holmes in the economically named "First Daughter," and in the other was Mandy Moore in the unfortunately titled "Chasing Liberty."
Who knows how these things happen, but in a presumably twinkly high-noon stare-down between the starlets, Holmes's vehicle tossed its hair and harrumphed off into the release-date ether, leaving Moore's standing victorious in the movie dead zone known as January.
There are, though, signs of life in "Chasing Liberty." None of them are intelligent, but Moore is such an exuberant and feeling girl-woman that it's surprising how much you'll tolerate Andy Cadiff's zipless direction, just because the star seems happy.
Moore plays 18-year-old Anna Foster, who has had it with the Secret Service trailing her on dates and to parties. While her father, President Foster (Mark Harmon), slogs through banquets and G8 Summit press conferences with mom (Caroline Goodall), thrill-seeking Anna disguise-dyes her blond hair to Moore's regular shiny chestnut hue and proceeds to ditch the agents, hop on the back of a young British guy's Vespa, and skip from Prague to Venice to Austria to Berlin to Harvard as a "Roman Holiday" sort of fugitive.
Anna is tasting, um, liberty, which, if I'm reading the movie's ingredients right, is vanilla-flavored and specked with nonpareils. POTUS is miffed, and FLOTUS is -- well, only Goodall's indecisive Southern accent registers. But the prez has an idea: Let Anna think she's free! This returns us to all that "Roman Holiday" business. The girl's Gregory Peck is the Vespa owner, an agent named Ben, played by a guy we've never seen before, named Matthew Goode. He's all sinew, with a voice wrapped in a seductive Mel Gibson husk that's alarming for a man who otherwise seems so slight.
Ben's mission from President Foster is to provide Anna with the illusion of freedom. (Tanned and gray, Harmon gives us a picture of what a Dean White House might look like, while his character's idea of power has a certain Bush-league brattiness: "I'm the president of the United States, I can trace whatever I want," he tells Anna, who replies: "Yeah, well trace this!" Very Jenna Bush, very occupied Iraq.) Naturally, Ben furnishes Anna with the illusion of attraction, too. Clueless about his assignment, Anna thinks that he's a photographer and that his interest in her is real. Which it is, but she can't know that he -- oh, never mind. Ben sees Anna skinny-dip, helps her bungee jump, and stops her from handing her virginity to a muscled Austrian named Gus Gus. He also gets her to Berlin in time for the Love Parade festival, whose copious sex and drugs the movie prudishly avoids.
As an unshakable Mandy Moore disciple, I'm worried that she'll forever wind up with the stuff Kirsten Dunst won't do. For the record, Moore's not as surprising or as brave as Dunst, but her very purity and sweetness are delightful throwbacks. OK, they're totally unfashionable. Last fall, she put out a sadly dismissed covers record, which included her tributes to Todd Rundgren, the Waterboys, and Joan Armatrading, and its squareness was sort of cool. "Chasing Liberty," while a lot less interesting and legitimately uncool, is a similar nod to junk nostalgia: It's one TV-movie romp that Kristy McNichol never got around to starring in.
("Chasing Liberty": **)
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
