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Welcome to Mooseport

Review by: Alysa Salzberg
AlysaSalzberg@TheCinemaSource.com

Welcome to Mooseport! The town features a number of stars, including Mr. Gene Hackman! Ray Romano is our town's top citizen! We're a cute place, full of small-town eccentricities!….

….Ladies and Gentlemen, sometimes the prospect of falling asleep in a movie theater seems like a blessed thing, even if the person beside you looks like a shifty psychopath.

The film is about what happens when Monroe "Eagle" Cole, a former President of the United States (played by Gene "I Normally do Good and/or Watchable Movies" Hackman) moves to little Mooseport, Maine (cue the folksy characters and pieces of dime-store Americana!) and ends up being persuaded to run as its mayor. But things get ugly when local hardware store owner Harold "Handy" Harrison (Ray Romano "” continuing the alliterative name tradition), who at first declines to run, is accidentally insulted by the former President, and decides to kick his Commander-in-Chief ass…by winning the mayoral election, that is. Handy's anger isn't ill-founded; for one thing, there's the fact that the Prez is seriously considering macking on local veteranarian Sally (Maura Tierney), who happens to be the love of unromantic Handy's life. But Eagle has problems of his own, too, like having to maintain his through-the-roof approval rating even now, so as to keep all his lucrative book deals and lectures intact. This might be problematic, since the low levels he'll go to win this little mayoral race has seriously diminished the high regard in which his two closest advisors Grace Sutherland (Marcia Gay Harden — yep, the one from the Oscars) and Bullard (Fred Savage — yep, the guy who's been involved in such wonderful works as The Wonder Years, The Princess Bride, and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me) held him.

To some of you, this might sound like one of those random, perhaps unexpectedly engrossing movies from the '40's or '50's you might catch one sleepless night on AMC. Well, it's not. And I don't mean that in a good way, for those of you who find those old movies boring "” because, no matter how boring you might think those movies are, I'd imagine very few, if any, can compare to the Grade-A boredom you will find here.

I knew my viewing experience was ill-fated from the very beginning. Literally within the first minute of the film, I found myself saying, "What this movie needs is Adam Sandler." Oh, I love Adam Sandler very much, and have a soft place in my heart for the sadly underrated Little Nicky, which I think is just brilliant "” however, it is not my normal practice to feel a movie

could be vastly improved if Sandler-ized (well, okay, the idea of The Hours: The Sandler Cut does have a bizarre appeal). But Mooseport is Sandler country "” or, at least, country that could be gentrified by Sandler. It's all here, the "crazy" townspeople, the random acts of inexplicable idiocy and/or grossness (an old man regularly runs naked through town), the honest-little-guy-versus-big-corporate-fuddy-duddies spiel, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum. Alas, no Sandler shows up, and we're left with an astonishingly dead, humorless script by Dead Poets Society scribe Tom Schulman, comedic scenes lacking in comedic timing, and actors who, for the most part, don't just seem "along for the ride" "” it's like they don't even realize they're in the car.

Welcome to Mooseport is billed as a comedy, but it isn't a failed comedy, or a drama disguised as a comedy "” it's nothing. Have you ever read about sailors stuck in the doldrums? That windless, landless expanse where everything hangs limp and lifeless, seems the best way for me to explain what this film feels like. Take the fiery Gene Hackman, the intelligent and dignified Marica Gay Harden, the affable Fred Savage "” and then have a succubus suck the souls out of them. Only Rip Torn (as the President's re-appointed p.r.poobah/advisor guy) and Christine Baranski (as the Prez's battleaxe of an ex-wife) seem not to have had all the spunk surgically removed from them.

What about Romano, here in his film debut? Actually, I'm not going to knock him. He's a good guy, but, with his Jerry Seinfeld-esque mannerisms, and delivery, it's a lot to ask him to carry a part like this on his shoulders. First of all, what Ray does best is be funny, and there's no funny to be had here. In fact, the only line that drew the faintest chuckle from me is something I think was improvised by Romano himself (I won't spoil it here "” that way, if one day your mortal enemy ties you to a chair and makes you watch this movie, at least you'll have something to be pleasantly surprised by "” suffice it to say, the line concerns hooking up a Nintendo, and, no, it doesn't have to do with sex). So, since there's no funny, what else has Ray got? He could have potential as a dramatic actor, maybe, but the movie doesn't call for that, either. No, all he's got is a character who is so clueless at love as to often come off as a total jerk, and so bland in all other aspects as to come off as a mere sketch of a man. Now, if Sandler had been chosen to play this part, he would have suffused it with his trademark love-it-or-hate-it wackiness, and, no

matter how clueless his character got, the audience, even if annoyed, would never think of him as a good for nothing bastard. As the film went on, in fact, I made a list of several other actors who might have better fit this role. But lucky for them, I guess their agents weren't asleep when this script came out. Anyway, long story short, it's not Romano, so much as the casting.

I found Maura Tierney's performance equally troubling, though not for the same reason. In fact, I got the impression that Tierney was doing all she could with her role, and she even succeeds in making her character more or less likeable now and then "” the problem to me is that she took the role in the first place. Now, I am a woman, and I do believe people should be able to have equal rights and salaries regardless of their genitalia. But I am neither a feminazi, nor someone who majored in Gender Studies in college. Yet I couldn't help but find the portrayal of women in this movie disturbingly misogynistic. Angered by his not popping the question, Sally takes her revenge on Handy, not by discussing her feelings or doing something cool like blowing up his beloved truck, but rather by berating and belittling him unto death. Tierney's character here is more abusive than the modern, murderous Lady Macbeth she played in the fantastic Scotland PA. Christine Baranski's character, at least, is supposed to be a mere caricature of a horrible spouse, but even there it goes too far "” yes, a fantasy of killing your ex-wife is perfectly normal, according to my dad, but to make it so simultaneously violent and matter-of-fact as director Donald Petrie does is a bit off-putting in a supposedly mainstream comedy, to say the least. Now and then, Mooseport seems to try to redeem itself as per the women, and a female is given a scene in which she's portrayed as "empowered" or "strong" — but it just comes off as patronizing.

Welcome to Mooseport is truly an awful movie. And awful movies are often all the more awful because you the viewer sees a thousand ways it could have been better. Maybe my biggest individual beef in this area is, for God's sake, when you have a golf course scene in a "comedy", use it for all it's worth! Think of it "” verbal humor works here, since people converse while golfing, physical humor works, too, it goes without saying "” in this, take a hint from Sandler's own Happy Gilmore. Bad as Welcome to Mooseport was (it even has blatant dog-birth inaccuracies!), the movie just kept getting worse. What could have been a mercifully brief 90 minutes stretched on and

on…or did it only feel that way? Conflicts that were really non-conflicts went on way too long for anyone. Even a cute dog, a fun cat photo on Sally's office wall, and Eagle's admittedly clever golf club covers offered next to no relief in this drowning pool of blandness. I like Romano, Hackman and the other fine actors (inexplicably) involved, but it will be a while before I can forgive them for welcoming me to Mooseport.

Movie Grade: D-

Synopsis:

A former U.S. president whose plan to retire in a small Northeastern coastal town goes awry when he tries to fill an empty mayoral seat. His opposition is a seemingly unassuming hardware store owner (Ray Romano) who quickly proves to be a wildly popular candidate.