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Friday, September 27, 2013
MOVIE REVIEW Baggage Claim
Finding A Man To Bring Her Back Down To Earth
Djimon Hounsou as Quinton and Paula Patton as Montana in David E. Talbert's
romantic comedy "Baggage Claim". Fox
Searchlight
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
FOLLOW
Friday,
September 27,
2013
Finding the love of your life sounds challenging enough, but flying around the
U.S.A. to do so? That's what Montana Moore (Paula Patton) does in David E.
Talbert's "Baggage Claim", a sometimes uproarious, mostly foolish romantic
comedy based on Mr. Talbert's best-selling novel.
Montana is a Baltimore resident and flight attendant whose mother Catherine
(Jenifer Lewis) has married and divorced five times. Catherine pressures
Montana to find Mister Right before her younger sister gets married in one
month. Surely she doesn't want to be the last woman in her family to get
hitched? Montana, a thirtysomething who lives next door to William Wright
(Derek Luke), who proposed to her way back in grade school, has 30 days, and
we're told, 30,000 miles, to find
the man of her dreams.
"Baggage Claim" flies high in the lunacy department. Un-tethered from
reality, the film plays as a craven fantasy of a lonely woman desperate for
love. Often Montana looks like OJ Simpson in a 1970s Hertz commercial.
She runs breathlessly through airports, leaping passenger lines in a single
bound to barely make flights that her exes, for heaven's sake, are on,
or to cities they're in. Montana has her cadre of work colleagues who
behave like air traffic controllers, bringing her in for landing and take off in
this humiliating ritual. Day or night, Montana suddenly drops everything
and rushes to the nearest airport in search of man-dom. Couldn't Montana
simply go online to a dating website and take a chance there instead?
Every man Montana runs into is of upper-middle class pedigree. Some are self-made, others self-centered -- the latter applicable to nearly
all. While a great number of men (and a fair share of women)
aren't species of record on fidelity matters, every man in "Baggage
Claim" is a self-interested or cheating cad. There's no shading or
variable in this lazy, broad strokes comedy.
Mr. Talbert shoots the film with the rich, velvety decor of the
covers of Mills & Boon novels or other duty-free trashy airline romance novels
Montana has likely run past in her high heels in search of a man. There's
one or two beautiful images of Montana and Graham (Boris Kodjoe) on a boat as an American flag
ripples and a sunset adorns but those cosmetics are but a dream as reality comes crashing down
later.
The cardboard characters and shallow treatment of Montana and her bunch of
merry, melancholic and miserable men, continues the reckless, asinine parade of
more cliché than clever Hollywood romantic comedies. Given such a poor
film and premise for a comedy why would one even care about the needy, low-self
esteemed character Ms. Patton plays? There's as much
"Mission:
Impossible" action for her here in chasing men than bad guys in Brad
Bird's film. How does a flight attendant who misplaces or leaves
everything behind manage to become one? Can a woman in a Hollywood
romantic comedy even be allowed to have self-love? The answer is clearly
no.
The class boundaries
in "Baggage Claim", like those in
"Blue Jasmine", are distinct. Much of
the behavior is a not so-veiled indictment of the rich, and, though to a much lesser
extent than Woody Allen's film, the poor. There's a scene where Montana,
in Washington D.C., pretends to be a crime victim to get a ride home late at
night. It's a marginalizing of the poor. A scene featuring Ned
Beatty amplifies this as his racist character generalizes about black
celebrities and blacks in general. Curiously, Montana has an upper-middle class life
yet flight attendants, last time I checked, barely get paid the peanuts they
serve. The decor of her house suggests Montana runs TransAlliance Airlines
rather than works for it.
The entire film is predicated on the oft-repeated fallacy that for a woman
nothing else matters in life than finding a man, that that is the
sole reason a woman lives. (If anything there should be a romantic comedy about the
truth: that most men cannot live without women.) "Baggage Claim" floats
the sexist notion that for a woman career and a love life are incongruous, since
Montana spends more time running around man-hunting than doing her job.
She barely has time for herself. What little time Montana has is spent
hiding in garbage cans or on fire escapes of other women's apartments at night
in the torrential rain. It's that pitiful.
In short, "Baggage Claim" is almost over before it begins. The film
very quickly tells us everything about its beginning, middle and end.
The film's gender politics are clear too: family businessman William calmly
waits for the inevitable while Montana goes nuts in search of it. One
flight attendant trades off on her excessive cleavage while another, a gay man,
is calm and collected. Telegraphing
happens throughout, from the last name of Mr. Luke's character to the Bobby
Brown song "If It Isn't Love".
Any redeeming qualities in "Baggage Claim" are in the performances of Jill Scott
but especially its stand-out Adam Brody, whose comic timing is impeccable. Both play
Montana's flight attendant colleagues who enable this disaster of minstrelsy and
keep it from being even worse than it is. The laughs come cheap, sad and
empty. "Baggage Claim", with all the talent it can harness in one
90-minute movie, just doesn't fly.
Also with: Taye Diggs, Djimon Hounsou, Tia Mowry-Hardrict, Trey Songz, Lauren
London, Christina Milian, Rickey Smiley, Terrence J, Affion Crockett, La La
Anthony.
"Baggage Claim" is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association Of America
for sexual content and some language.
The film's running time is one hour and 36 minutes.
COPYRIGHT 2013. POPCORNREEL.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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