Welcome to Mooseport

Gemey and I just came back from screening Welcome to Mooseport at the Keller 8 cinema. Welcome to Mooseport stars Ray Romano, Gene Hackman and Maura Tierney, and purports to be a romantic comedy. It has very little romance, and not a whole lot of comedy, though Gene Hackman can read a phone book and be watchable.

Mooseport is a small northeastern town that boasts the summer home of Monroe "Eagle" Cole the "most popular President in history" played by Gene Hackett. Now an ex-president Hackett has to come to grips with being out of the limelight. Through a series of contrived circumstances, the ex-President decides to run for mayor. Unbeknownst, to him "Handy" Harrison (Ray Romano) has already filed to run for mayor. Monroe convinces Harrison to drop out, and proceeds to make a date with Harrison's girlfriend Sally (Tierney).

Jealousy, blah blah blah, Harrison decides to run against "the most popular President in history" blah blah blah.

The real central theme is commitment, and Harrison's lack of it. He's been dating his girlfriend for 6 years, and she's been waiting for a wedding ring. She begins the process of giving up on the reticent handyman, and dating the president is part of leaving her lover behind.

Ostensibly Harrison is not a risk taker, and in this is found his reluctance to marry. In a movie full of lame contrivances, this is the one most in need of shooting. Here me now, all you ladies out there - men don't commit if they get everything they want without committing. When you mom said "nobody buys a book if the library lends it for free" she wasn't spouting some sexual repression mantra invented by the Puritanical male hegemony to rob women of their sexual freedom. This is an inescapable universal truth about unredeemed man.

Sally and Handy are supposedly in love, but stagnant. Handy obviously has access to Sally's companionship, love, home and is clearly knowledgeable about her underwear. What exactly does he get extra if he offers her a wedding ring?

Of course we all know how this ends, since the plot could be predicted by a Bedoin shepherd plucked straight from the marshlands of Arabia and plopped down into a movie seat. However, let me ask this. What is more romantic, a guy who proposes rather than lose his chaste love relationship, or a guy who proposes rather than lose his relationship with a lover? In a society where sex is so damn important 70 year olds take drugs to get it, the romantic connection implied by a marriage proposal is cheapened by prior sexual intimacy.

This movie was so lame that I was actually glad the the title was Welcome to Mooseport rather than simply Mooseport because there was so little worth writing about I was simply glad to have the extra words. This is too bad, because with a little more thoughtfulness it could have been halfway decent. It isn't like they didn't have the talent.

Tim McNabb