Somewhere in the middle of "Music and Lyrics," it hit me: Hugh Grant has the exact persona of C-3PO.
Watch the guy, and you'll see it, too. The eyeballs that roll as if they're ball bearings. The mannerisms, the speech patterns. The snotty, disaffected British politeness forming a fragile shell for underplayed sarcasm. He is a Romance-atron 3000.
Grant soldiers through "Music and Lyrics" with the well-honed roboticism that's served him well through more than a decade. He slips compatibly from one female lead to the next — Julianne Moore, Julia Roberts, Renée Zellweger and now Drew Barrymore — without so much as a disc read error. Grant's latest Valentine's Day offering likewise hits the predisposed chick-flick spots with mechanical precision.
It's a love story featuring Grant as Alex, a washed-up 1980s musician who tries to get back on top by co-writing a song for a hot pop artist with Sophie (Barrymore), a burnout who has given up on her literary aspirations. As Alex and Sophie pen bubble-gum lyrics, they flirt, banter with canned, too-cute humor and wait around for the big late-film disagreement that will separate them only to see fate pull them back together for a final-scene embrace.
People are also reading…
Both Grant and Barrymore have been through the routine enough to play parts like this in their sleep, but both manage to keep moderately awake enough to have you think they actually care about what's going on. Writer/director Marc Lawrence ("Miss Congeniality," "Two Weeks Notice") has some fun poking fun at 1980s nostalgia, particularly in an opening-film music video showing Alan rocking out in his cheeseball heyday. Grant performs his own songs, which aren't all that bad — this is the sort of loving parody that can spawn only from true adoration, such as the relationship "A Mighty Wind" had with 1960s folk music.
Lawrence's dialogue isn't quite so sharp. It's cute but contrived, but often so funny it doesn't even matter. Alan, in particular, has some good lines.
Lawrence also takes some playful stabs at the current pop-princess phenomenon, featuring Haley Bennett as Cora, the gyrating airhead who's asked Alan to pen the song. With commanding confidence, Bennett's performance is a dead-on evisceration of the Britney-Christina prototype.
With a cynical eye, you could make a case that "Music and Lyrics" is similarly a parody of romantic comedies, so rigidly does it stick to the formula. But that would be like reading deeper meaning into "Hit me baby, one more time."
Review
Music and Lyrics HH1/2 — Rated PG-13 for some sexual content. Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant star. Marc Lawrence writes and directs. 96 minutes. Playing at Park Place, El Con, Century Park, Foothills and Desert Sky.
