Review of Two Weeks Notice on Filmviews.net
Year2002 ReviewerChris Docker
Today was a bad day at work: our best shot financial strategy hadn't paid off and we were still in the red. We'd talked through the options many times and there were no easy answers - but I still needed cheering up. I didn't want an intellectually challenging piece of art film and I far from needed being on the edge of my seat. I wanted to be entertained. Homely, reassuring, lightweight, entertainment. A couple of hours of fantasy world portrayed by movie stars. A world where things came right in the end, where there was love at the end of the rainbow, happiness for ordinary people who believed in something, and maybe streets that are paved with gold. It's not realistic and I don't need it to be.
Bollywood has rivalled Hollywood in the sheer volume and contribution to human happiness that it's movie machine turns out. There is a formula usually involving love, rivalry and the odd battle; song and dance are used liberally; good acting or advanced cinematography ('art') are often secondary to whether the movie fulfils its purpose - lifting the spirits of millions of Indians who live below the poverty line and whose daily grind is closer to wartime rationing than anything most westerners have ever experienced (By some not too strange coincidence, war-time was also when Hollywood churned out some of the most uplifting song and dance formulaic movies ever, also attracting movie stars of distinction in those areas).
The art of using movies to raise our spirits from life's monotony is one that is almost lost. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, our basic requirements are so well attended to that we 'need' something more from movies - aesthetic appreciation and self-actualisation tend to figure as our critical benchmarks rather than wish-fulfilment in terms of belongingness and esteem, or the more basic physiological needs that wealthy film characters (and the stars that play them) would never seem to have to have a care about - the stuff to fuel our fantasies. In times of stress, modern day life has us reaching for drink, drugs or Prozac, or the timeless lure of religion to ease our worries. We seem to have forgotten that cinema can be a placebo, that it does not need Oscar-worthy performances, it simply needs to make us feel good.
'Two Weeks Notice' has formulaic script and acting that make it easily digestible and exactly what I was looking for tonight. Written expressly for the two main stars (Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock), we see them given free reign for their main foibles: Grant plays top New York lawyer George Wade as a rich, bumbling Englishman who needs a woman to help him choose a shirt. Bullock plays Harvard-educated Kelson, a lawyer who fights for the poor and doesn't care about money. They are less believable as lawyers than the preposterous characters of the TV show Ally McBeal but who cares? The audiences who go to see movies like this don't expect realism any more than if the characters were singing and dancing their way through the film. It's the deal. A light and fluffy no-concentration story, a sprinkling of stars, and a money-doesn't-make-you-happy and love-wins-in-the-end theme.
Oxford graduate Hugh Grant has often said he has no pretensions about being a great actor as long as he can earn a living making films - a comment I find both reasonable and slightly endearing (although has won quite a few awards). Similarly Sandra Bullock is not someone associated with the sort of performances that have audiences gasping at her acting talents - they both seem competent B-list actors and are maybe only A-list because of audience popularity. Perhaps this is something, dare it be said, we should give rather more respect to than we do? Perhaps there are socio-entertainment lessons to be learnt from Bombay.
Rating: 6/10;