The Perfect Man
''The Perfect Man" is the new Hilary Duff movie, and like most of her contributions to cinema, it is to be endured rather than enjoyed. She plays Holly, the upbeat teenage daughter of Jean (Heather Locklear), a genius pastry chef who packs up her two girls and leaves town whenever a man breaks her heart. The gang winds up in Brooklyn, where Holly decides she's tired of moving and is convinced that the best way to keep her mother anchored is to concoct a man who treats her right.
Following the advice of a friend's restaurateur uncle, Ben (Chris Noth), Holly leaves her mother an orchid and writes her a love letter from this fictitious perfect man. As it happens, he is also named Ben and he says and does all the things a lovelorn and terribly gullible person might want to hear.
The ruse reaches its uncomfortable climax when the daughter, pretending to be Ben, engages her mother in a round of instant messaging. The movie's PG rating ensures that that sequence doesn't become the perverse treat it could have been. As a compromise, we do learn that Jean's dream is to ''make people fall in love with baking again."
Mom is swept off her feet, and the movie's foolish fantasy comes awfully close to seeming nuts. When Jean's friend (Caroline Rhea) has a bridal shower at Ben's restaurant, Holly nearly sabotages his joint to keep her mother from seeing him (Holly misguidedly sent a photo of the real Ben with a letter). Eventually, the daughter has to break up with her mother because the scheme is a lot of work. It's all too cruel. But predictably, it ends well.
Holly and Jean's relationship might have made for a nifty melodrama or psychological thriller. See how the mother's selfishness and low self-esteem has made a little narcissist of the daughter. Observe how the daughter, so much like her mother but so unaware, lashes out. But ''The Perfect Man" is not ''Mildred Pierce," ''Terms of Endearment," or even ''Anywhere But Here." It's a dopey little Disney Family Channel movie, if not in name then in spirit.
Still, what ''The Perfect Man" offers is preferable to any drama starring Duff and Locklear. Neither woman has a talent I can name -- unless, in Locklear's case, longevity can be considered a skill. (Her face looks magically flawless.) All the same, each woman is bearable in her own way.
I did enjoy Ben Feldman, the actor playing the sweet, budding comic-book artist with the raging crush on Holly. The character's feelings for this self-absorbed girl are hard to understand, but Feldman encourages us to believe in them anyway.
Otherwise, there is a cartoonish Noo Yawk accent or two, and there's an idiotic, Styx-obsessed suitor (Mike O'Malley) from the bakery where Jean works. There's also a cheesy family dance-along to a terrible techno song that inspires the ladies to collapse on the sofa convulsing with giggles. (Uncle Ben promises the music will make any woman happy. I'm not a woman, and it nauseated me.)
At 17, Duff still doesn't seem comfortable in her skin. But this movie reveals a dark side that is much more appealing than her spunky one. To see what she's really capable of, I'm rooting for ''The Perfect Man -- Episode III," where she finally puts on a big black helmet and wheezes her little heart out.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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