Rumor Has It… (2005) - movie about the rumor that there was a real family that the movie The Graduate was based on. just to be clear this is not about the movie The Graduate, this is about the human The Graduate that the toy Buzz Lightyear is based on. jennifer aniston stars as a character who has motivations and qualities which is always weird to me bc not to be mean but i always think of her as like a human metal gear solid stealth suit who has to move around a lot before your brain can perceive there’s anyone there. i have a hard time watching her since i keep saying “huh?! must be my imagination…” and going back on patrol.
anyway here she is playing the daughter and grandaughter of the ladies from the real graduate (distinct from the hanna barbara graduate). instead of running away with dustin hoffman at the end, her mom married a different guy and now our heroine is wondering which of them is actually her dad. she tracks the hoffman character down and he’s now played by kevin costner - more than that, since it’s a 1990s period piece to make the timelines fit up, he’s also a guru for an exciting new thing called “the internet” who we meet giving a conference speech at a trendy san fran party where people are saying things like “we just secured the domain name lobster dot com”.
people from california would probably know this more than me but i got the impression it was trying to make some point abt like, the sedate early 60s country club bits of california (someplace called “pasadena” which i assume does not really exist) and the exciting contemporary parts like san francisco, where you can do things like attend a conference on the internet, eat at a chinese restaurant, uh, ride a… private plane? get rides in someone’s painstakingly restored vintage roadster as he takes you to his vineyard? as this suggests the distinctions are often not as sharp as the movie seems to think, which makes it funnier how the aniston character INSTANTLY decides she resonates so much more with this flavour of fussy cali rich shit than her native kind and this must mean that he’s really her dad. after she announces her suspicion he lets her know that he medically can’t have kids bc someone kicked him in the balls really hard during a soccer match. anyway, that all cleared up they have sex instead.
okay… in fairness. the movie does weight the odds so as to try to make this all less skeevy. it’s clearly trying to present this all as a fun twist on the original movie and to take the “possibly my dad??” thing off the table. the aniston character is kind of unhinged for different reasons and we’re meant to read it in that context, etc. the funny thing is that they sort of whitewash it so much that the incesty associations if anything seem more notable by their absence. in the big ending speech where mark ruffalo as the starter fiancee takes her back, he talks the whole time like she just went through like regular wedding jitters or infidelity and does not address the uh psychosexual elephant in the room (worst kind of elephant). honestly i mostly just found it creepy in a “rob reiner really thinks this guy must be so cool” kind of way. although when she wakes up in costner’s bedroom the next day the first thing she discovers is a framed photograph of him hanging out with bill clinton, which probably seems more of a red flag now than it would at the time.
oh yeah i almost forgot the funniest part of the movie: she starts it engaged to the mark ruffalo character who is a lawyer and i was joking about how lawyers are always the discarded starter-pack boyfriends in these things. but by the end she ends up with him again!! how bad do you have to blow it in these things to end up with the lawyer!
finally i would like to say: they do introduce the costner character’s (in vitro) son at one point and i was very disappointed she did not fuck him, which would have probably completed some kind of dialectical greimas square arrangement. other solid possibilities would include the real dad sleeping with the fake one or mark ruffalo sleeping with shirley maclaine as the grandma. on one hand i sorta respect spending $70 million USD to tell a story with such little reverence for the nuclear family, on the other, why do it unless you’re willing to go all the way?
minor things i liked: aniston’s resident evil movie outfit when tracking down her not-dad, and her extremely large headshot on mark ruffalo’s desk.
