January 23, 2004 | There's something
at once eerily retro and exuberantly campy about Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! A
giggly throwback to teen-skewing romantic comedies of 30 or 40 years
ago, the movie buzzes with conflicting signals of sweetness and self-parody
as it playfully spins a plot at least partly inspired by – no kidding! – Bye
Bye Birdie .
Much like the aforementioned musical, Tad Hamilton brings
a superstar celebrity to an unpretentious small town where he can interact
with an adoring fan. In this case, however, the title character is a
jaded movie star, not a drafted rock 'n' roller. And the adoring fan
turns out to be the most commonsensible character on screen.
Tad Hamilton (Josh Duhamel of TV's Las Vegas ) is a hunky dreamboat
whose Mr. Nice Guy image is temporarily besmirched by tabloid-fueled
scandal. Director Robert Luketic ( Legally Blonde ) and screenwriter
Victor Levin have some rather quaint notions about what actually constitutes
a scandal these days – Tad is photographed while smoking a cigarette
and driving very fast while the babe seated beside him swigs a presumably
alcoholic beverage – but never mind. The bad publicity requires extreme
counter-measures, so Tad's fey managers (Nathan Lane and Sean Hayes in
ultra-mincing mode) arrange for their client to be first prize in a charity-benefit “win
a date” contest.
And the winner is: Rosalee Futch (Kate Bosworth),
a radiantly chipper cutie-pie who toils as a Piggly Wiggly cashier
in Fraziers Bottom, West Virginia. Much to the delight of Cathy (Ginnifer
Goodwin), her equally starstruck best friend, and very much to the
dismay of Pete (Topher Grace), a smart-alecky store manager who's none-too-secretly
sweet on her, Rosalee is flown to a whimsically caricatured Los Angeles
for a dinner date with her idol. Tad makes some smooth moves, which
she politely rebuffs in a manner that makes her seem – to Tad, at least – all
the more irresistible.
Impulsively drawn to her unaffected “real word” charm, Tad follows her
back to Fraziers Gulch, fully intending to maintain a “platonic friendship” while
Rosalee helps him rethink his priorities. Naturally, the friendship quickly
warms into something else. Just as naturally, Pete is hopelessly, helplessly
jealous.
By turns coy and calculated, and very often a little bit of both, Tad
Hamilton plays by the Old Hollywood rules restricting on-screen
courtship – Tad and Rosalee are repeatedly interrupted before they
can consummate their relationship – even as it overplays the gay subtext
that often percolated beneath the surface of '50s and '60s movies with
Doris Day, Rock Hudson and the ineffably flighty Tony Randall. In addition
to the mincing managers played by Lane and Hayes, there's a hotel manager
who's all too eager to provide massage service for Ted.
The movie often is engaging and amusing, despite its overall air of wink-wink,
nudge-nudge self-consciousness, but all three leads have a distracting
tendency to remind you of other people. Topher Grace looks and sounds like
he's channeling Robert Downey Jr., Kate Bosworth suggests a younger and
more level-headed Daryl Hannah, and Josh Duhamel comes across as a hybrid
of Brendan Fraser and Greg Kinnear. By now, audiences should be accustomed
to movies obviously inspired by other movies. But it's still somewhat startling
to encounter a film in which the lead roles appear to be played by stand-ins.