Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
Rob Reiner
Cast :
Jennifer Aniston……….Sarah Huttinger
Kevin Costner……….Beau Burroughs
Shirley MacLaine……….Katharine Richelieu
Mark Ruffalo……….Jeff Daly
Richard Jenkins……….Earl Huttinger
Christopher McDonald……….Roger McManus
Steve Sandvoss……….Scott
Mena Suvari……….Annie Huttinger
Rumor Has It… feels like it’s a combination of a couple of great movies that combine into one mediocre one. Having cycled through one director, a cinematographer and various cast changes, Rumor Has It… has plenty of stamps from plenty of different people on it. It’s part romantic drama, part comedy, part nostalgia trip and an attempt at trying to recapture some of the magic from a movie long since removed from theatres.
Rumor Has It… is Rob Reiner’s latest entry and follows Sarah (Jennifer Aniston) and her fiancée Jeff (Mark Ruffalo) as they go back to Sarah’s hometown of Pasadena to do two things: meet her family and attend the wedding of Sarah’s sister Annie (Mena Suvari). With all sorts of comic hilarity inserted, Sarah discovers her family is the one used to base the Robinsons in The Graduate, complete with her grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) as the lead seductress of the film and the young man (Kevin Costner) who wound up with both mother and daughter. What follows is a journey of self discovery for Sarah, as she has to evaluate everything in her life and where she stands with everyone in it.
And played for laughs or for serious antics Rumor Has It… could be a great film. It has all the ingredients for it: a top cast, a good director and some great cinematography. But something happened to all three en route to making this film. In trying to craft a film that’s more suited for drama, Rob Reiner tries to put into too many of his own brand of humor
Reiner is a man whose responsible for some modern masterpieces (The Princess Bride, A Few Good Men, Stand by Me and This is Spinal Tap) seems to be out of his element as he tries to craft his brand of comedy onto a film that has something else going for it. With a lot of dramatic moments and situations inherent to the film, Reiner tries to add too much obvious humor in a film whose best moments are subtle ones.
It takes away from a cast whose pretty solid in what it does. While the light is focused on Costner and Aniston for most of the time, Ruffalo and MacLaine provide some lighter moments as well. The film focuses on Costner and Aniston so much that the supporting isn’t used as much as it could; there’s plenty of story to go around and the film’s supporting cast could use some development. There’s a certain amount of development that could’ve been made in the film to make some of the film’s more dramatic moments resonate more.
