In Her Shoes deals with questions of family.
What happens to daughters who mature without the life advice of a mother – or even a grandmother?
Can parents ruin their children with worry?
Are fractured families worth mending?
These are questions I never saw director Curtis Hanson answering with the slightest bit of grace or delicacy. Hanson’s L.A. Confidential was a dark, brash, moody film noir, and 8 Mile, his Detroit odyssey starring Eminem, was even bleaker, if only aesthetically.
Both movies were cinematic diamonds carved from worlds of grit.
But with In Her Shoes, Hanson lightens his touch wonderfully and tells a definitively feminine story. And it’s told with the nuance of storytellers like James L. Brooks, whose films, such as Terms of Endearment, explored the issues of women and, more importantly, family with the kind of expertise that made you feel like you were watching something real rather than the Hollywood version of something that might have once been real.
Hanson also appears to be one of the best actors’ directors in Hollywood today. In L.A. Confidential, he opted for two virtual unknowns to star as his male leads: Australians Guy Pierce and Russell Crowe, who at the time had very little credit to their names. In In Her Shoes, he shepherds Cameron Diaz – an actress with an enjoyable-though-dismissable career thus far – through her best performance to date as the melancholy temptress Maggie Feller. She’s funny, she’s sad, she’s complicated – she’s a real person rather than the typical cardboard pinups she portrayed in past films such as There’s Something About Mary or The Sweetest Thing.
In Her Shoes is mostly about Maggie. One day, she shows up penniless, homeless and beautiful, at the Philadelphia apartment of her workaholic lawyer sister Rose (Toni Collette). Maggie is a messy, disorganized wreck who throws Rose’s manageable, calculated life into immediate disarray. She lives by her looks, and though she has plenty of success stories in the bedroom, the rest of her life has been a large series of disappointments and failures. Rose is the polar opposite.
The only thing they share is the same size-six shoe, and Rose has enough lacy, strappy footwear locked up in her closet to keep them both outfitted for eons. Maggie, however, is the sister with the sense of sexuality and confidence to wear them in public.
After several weeks, Maggie is predictably booted out of the apartment after she betrays Rose. With nowhere to go, she turns to a bunch of birthday cards from a long-lost grandmother (Shirley MacLaine), looks up the address – which is in a retirement community somewhere near Miami – and moves there.
Maggie’s grandmother, Ella, is one of the more mysterious tenants in retirement. She claims she has no children – a lie that’s soon publicly shattered when Maggie shows up unexpectedly and starts prancing around, exciting all the old curmudgeons who spend their days playing shuffleboard and chess.
Maggie prods Ella about her mother, who died in a car accident when she was a child, fracturing the Feller family for more than a decade. Ella, at first, answers reluctantly and tersely. But it’s the chance at a real relationship with her grandchildren that forces Ella to open up and face her past and the parental misjudgments she may have made with her daughter – Rose and Maggie’s mother.
In Her Shoes leads Rose, Maggie and Ella to realizations about the importance of family and the value of regret. They’re themes that could have unfolded into cliches on film, but Hanson juggles them wonderfully. The movie’s final moments turn out to be somewhat cheesy, but it doesn’t matter.
At that point, Hanson’s already developed three fantastic characters and their resolutions aren’t nearly as important as their respective journeys.
Contact reporter Jonathan Cribbs at cribbsdbk@gmail.com.
