New in Town
You've seen "New in Town" before, and you've seen it done better. Still, it's a sweet-hearted bit of anemia, pleasant and obvious, and there are a few honest laughs to it - you could also do worse, especially at this time of the year. There: Have I lowered your expectations enough?
Renee Zellweger, blond and slim and showing off a pair of killer legs, plays Lucy Hill, a corporate mucky-muck from Miami who arrives in the frozen Minnesota hamlet of New Ulm to lay off a bunch of factory workers. If you've seen "Local Hero" or "Northern Exposure," you can start filling in the blanks: The locals will be whimsical and adorable, Lucy will fume amusingly, there'll be a cantankerous-but-attractive member of the opposite sex, the seductions of small-town life will cast their spell.
And that's pretty much how "New in Town" rolls along under Jonas Elmer's bumpy but capable direction. (He's a Danish filmmaker making his Hollywood debut; the studio must have figured he'd know from snow). The most whimsical of the locals is Lucy's secretary, Blanche (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), who makes scrapbooks, talks fluent "Fargo," and is always sayin' the gosh-darn most cutest things. The cantankerous-but-attractive etc. is Ted Mitchell, a union rep played by Harry Connick Jr. with a scrofulous growth of beard that does no one any favors.
"New in Town" takes a while to get started, and the opening scenes are the movie's most groaningly predictable. Once it gets Lucy to New Ulm and past the introductions, though, Elmer and the players ease up. Zellweger gets to uncork a gift for minor slapstick after a sequence in which Lucy, her car stranded during a blizzard, guzzles wine to stay warm. The reliable J.K. Simmons turns up - also under heavy whiskers - as a plant foreman, drolly conspiring against the newcomer. His underplaying neatly balances out Hogan's overplaying.
Meanwhile there's Zellweger, currently one of our more curious movie stars. A while back she was playing a twee Beatrix Potter; last year, in "Appaloosa," she was an Old West schoolmarm who slept around. Now this, and who else would think to have a vacation in mid-winter Minnesota? Zellweger's features are puckering closer to the center of her face as she gets older, but Lucy is one of her happier creations: confident, sexy, secretly a klutz.
Likewise, the movie's got a woodstove for a heart - it takes a while to heat up but eventually it warms the room. You'll probably have come around by the time Lucy takes Ted's teenage daughter (Ferron Guerreiro) to the city for a prom makeover, or the scene where the main characters drop everything and just go crow hunting. (No crows are harmed in this movie, and anyway, that's beside the point.)
The ending? You'll see it coming a mile off across the frozen tundra. If that bothers you, stay home and listen to "Prairie Home Companion." "New in Town" might not get you through February, but it'll get you to next week, and these days we take what we can get.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.
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