Sweet November, the biggest release of the week, is so bad that there is very little to be said about it. It’s not even worth pulling apart, since it falls apart anyway as you watch it, if it was ever together in the first place.
Onse Charlize Theron plays Sara, a dippy-hippy chick who first encounters driven workaholic Nelson (Keanu Reeves) during a driving test. His actions leave him sort of owing her one, which is what leads to the further connection between the characters.
These are very different people, as you can tell by their clothes and their habitations. Nelson wears dark suits and lives in an apartment apparently borrowed from Mel Gibson in What Woman Want, while Sara has an inexhaustible supply of thrift-shop knitwear and lives in a flat that looks very much like a Yeoville home of the Eighties.
The concept of the movie, if one can dignify it as such, is that Sara has a unique system when it comes to relationships: she has a different boyfriend every month, who comes to live with her and learn from her. He learns, that is, to be a better person, or at least a happier person – more relaxed, more willing to do life-enhancing things such as cartwheels on the beach and being nice to fatherless children. It’s unfortunate that whatever else she can do she cannot turn Nelson into an interesting character.
His lack of depth, however, is Reeves’s fault (and that of a hopeless script). As an actor, Reeves has no range; he is good when he’s playing himself, one suspects, or in a part with simple parameters. He is a man of wax. The highlights of his career have to be River’s Edge (a rather thick-headed youngster), Speed (hunky but largely impassive policeman) and The Matrix (elegantly violent black silhouette). The latter two roles seem to indicate he is at his best playing a cipher, a plot-point rather than a character, though his turn as a wife-battering redneck in The Gift gave some small indication of what might be possible if he pursued the darker kind of figure. At least he has shaved for Sweet November and gets his shirt off a couple of times.
Theron is better than Reeves in Sweet November, though not by much. She has greater flexibility in her facial muscles than Reeves does, and a wider repertoire of expressions. She does a dimply smirk when she’s meant to be cute and goes all puffy and red-eyed when she’s meant to be tragic.
Tragedy is the mode of the last third of the movie, following upon all the argumentation necessary to make Nelson’s moving in with Sara vaguely credible and, in the middle third, the inevitable business of falling in love. Thus, the film moves from unfunny romantic comedy to unconvincing love story to inept puller of heart-strings, and all of it is equally boring.