Jersey Girl
"Jersey Girl" introduces a softer side of the prickly, prankish writer and director Kevin Smith, who has never made so happy and unfussy a movie. Yes, Kevin Smith, the ace stoner and indie stalwart, wants to send you home on a different sort of high.
It's tempting to call his cuddly movie -- which is produced, as all Smith's movies are, by Miramax -- a bid for easy commercial triumph. But the sincerity on display in "Jersey Girl" soothes that kind of cynicism.
In his fifth film for Smith, Ben Affleck plays Ollie Trinke, a workaholic music-industry publicist who marries Gertie (Jennifer Lopez), a family-minded book editor. They have a baby and she dies in labor, never to appear again, leaving him to raise a daughter on his own. So it's "Goodbye, Bennifer!" Yet Lopez's departure is lamentable: She's never been more naturally funny than she is in her short time here. Affleck shoulders "Jersey Girl" with his typical blend of hubris and reluctance. He seems to be acting through some cloud of shame, as if stardom were something that he didn't want but that keeps happening to him anyway.
That predicament suits him in this role. Widowed Ollie isn't cut out for fatherhood. Clearly: He names the baby Gertie, which some will see as a tribute and others as an act of cruelty.
Ollie saddles the infant on his own father, Bart (George Carlin), a gold-hearted grump who still lives in Ollie's childhood home in Highlands, a small town on the Jersey Shore and Smith's hometown. It doesn't take long for Bart to stick his son with the baby for the day. Ollie takes her to the office on a day Fresh Prince, Will Smith, is set to donate some old gear to the Hard Rock Cafe. (The film claims to be set in the very early '90s, when Will Smith was still merely a rapper.)
Smith is tardy and the crowd of journalists is restless. An exasperated Ollie, babe in arms, berates them all, effectively torching his career and sending him home to Highlands to raise his daughter, who grows into the utterly charming 11-year-old Raquel Castro.
Ollie's new life couldn't be more different. He works with Bart and Bart's two pals (Stephen Root and Mike Starr), doing municipal labor around town, learning to embrace his average Joe-ness.
If "Jersey Girl" seems an awful lot like a sitcom, it's not too far from one. Watch Gertie play "you show yours" with a neighbor. See Ollie carry on a movie-long flirtation with Maya (Liv Tyler), the relentless but lovely grad student who rents him his videos. Then there's Carlin's lovably gruff barfly, who's a lesson-laden reality check for his son's ambitions.
But for once, I don't mean "sitcom" as a dismissive put-down. This is a very good collection of episodes about the weekly compromises that parents make for their kids and the little dreams that children have for themselves. It's all derived from Smith's own life as a newish father. Smith, by his own admission, has never been much of director. With their do-it-yourself aesthetic, his movies have been more confrontational than mature or focused. For "Jersey Girl," he has hired the legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond to make the picture look more respectable than "Chasing Amy" and "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back."
Working in his mellowest register, Smith is disarming here. Sure, everything about the movie is familiar, from having young Gertie set the story up in a school essay, right down to the blocky feel-good finale. And "Jersey Girl" isn't as inspired, brave, or impassioned as 1999's "Dogma," his borderline masterpiece. It's not as ambitious as 2001's occasionally witty "Jay and Silent Bob." But it is more heartfelt, full of people you care about. And I never thought I'd care about anybody in a Smith movie. The director's fans might not appreciate his sudden ease with sentiment and interest in canned formulas: The movie is profoundly uncool.
But "Jersey Girl" is eloquent and unapologetically cute. Gertie, for instance, develops an obsession with the musical "Sweeney Todd" that produces a scene of such surprising sweetness that I welled up. Maybe, in forgoing his trademark troublemaking, Smith has sold out. I'd like to think that he has just bought into the pleasures of adulthood.
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