Life is not neat or logical. People can act irrationally or inconsistently and regret it later. Even when we try our best, with the best of intentions, things can go wrong. Events don't develop along straight lines. Beginnings and endings are often blurred and uncertain. Apparently random elements are always intruding. Does that mean a film that has those qualities is disorganized and frustrating or true to life? We've seen this story, or something like it, before: Man madly in love with wife loses her in childbirth, struggles to rebuild his life, encounters massive problems with care of the baby before finding Ms. Wrong Nanny who of course turns out to be Ms. Right Number Two. Why should anyone watch this one? MY reason for watching it is that I will watch anything with Samantha Mathis in it. Why should YOU watch it? Well, it's English, very much in the style of Richard Curtis's films such as Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually. It even has the same gimmick of an American woman in London (Amy, the Mathis character). But while this film has her plus a very strong British supporting cast, the disappointment is at the center: The Grant in this film, Richard E., is just no match for Curtis's Grant (Hugh); or maybe he was disastrously miscast. The Curtis films, while having as many pieces as Jack and Sarah, manage somehow to put them together better, and even when those films are just sort of noodling along, the hilarious one-liners are enough to keep the viewer going until something actually happens. Jack and Sarah's script is just not up to the caliber of the Curtis films. I would like to have learned more about how Amy (the Mathis character) wound up in London, or why she was working as a waitress. I would have liked to learn more about Jack's (Grant's) job as a solicitor: As with Ally McBeal, L.A. Law and The Practice, no actual work ever seems to transpire in the office. The most implausible element is the transformation of the character William (Ian McKellen): When we first see him, he is an alcoholic bum living on the street, and the next thing you know, he is living in Jack's house in the position of a very propah butler or butler equivalent. I suspect some intervening scenes didn't make the final cut.
Review of Jack & Sarah
