An Oscar-winning writer in a slump leaves Hollywood to teach screenwriting at a college on the East Coast, where he falls for a single mom taking classes there.
An entertaining comedy with a nicely delivered message about second chances.
It would be easy to dismiss this as a plastic Hugh Grant rom-com but it has enough smarts, laughs and feel for its likeable characters to make it worth your while.
The in-jokes about Hollywood are very soft-centred, and the portrayal of the doughty and attractive single mom (Marisa Tomei) is sentimental in the extreme, but this film is still thoroughly likeable, witty and a vast improvement on Grant’s earlier collaboration with the director Marc Lawrence on Did You Hear about the Morgans?.
This disappointing romcom about a screenwriter can’t explain why screenwriters frontload jokes into the first act.
There is nothing in the old-fashioned The Rewrite that is unexpected but it has some funny one-liners and the smooth professionalism of Grant, Tomei and the able cast make it work.
The story will not surprise but the setting and characters have a freshness that appeals and there are some very droll moments, enhanced by a top-notch supporting cast.
A decent supporting cast can’t redeem Marc Lawrence’s fourth Hugh Grant vehicle.
Really, if you are fashioning a meta-romantic comedy, repeating all the clichés is not the way to go about it. The fact that the onlookers are irritated by the inconvenient hold-up caused by The Big Romantic Speech is just about the freshest idea in the whole film.
General release. Check local listings for show times.