"New in Town" (2009) -- Initial Thoughts

I have wasted fourteen years not watching this movie.  Hurrah for the Seen on the Screen Blogathon giving me the push to finally pull it off my TBW shelves and watch it!  Because this is probably going to end up on my list of top new favorite movies watched this year.  I adored it!!!  

Lucy (Renee Zellweger) is a high-powered executive working and living in Miami.  Her bosses send her to New Ulm, Minnesota, in the dead of winter to restructure a manufacturing facility.  "Restructure" being a polite word for "lay off most of the workers," of course.

I was always leery of watching this movie because... I have been to New Ulm.  Five or six times.  It's a real place in southern Minnesota, about half an hour from where I went to college.  And I was really afraid that this whole movie would be mocking and denigrating Minnesotans, Midwesterners, and so on.  Because I could tell from the trailers when it came out that the focus would be on a culture clash between the sophisticated Miamian and the unsophisticated Minnesotans.  That sounded like it would probably end up being unkind at best, and downright mean at worst.

But... I really like Renee Zellweger AND Harry Connick Jr.  So, I bought a used copy of this at a thrift store a few years ago, stuck it on my To-Be-Watched shelves... and was still too afraid to watch it.

But, guys, I should not have been.  Because it is actually not a mean-spirited movie!  Yes, there is a huge culture clash.  But it's really based on class, not on location.  The blue-collar workers at the factory in Minnesota live in a world with very different values and expectations than what the high-powered executive is used to in her world.  If anyone gets made fun of, it's mainly Lucy, with her snobbery toward someone who would talk about Jesus with full sincerity, or someone who thinks scrapbooking is cool, or someone who won't let their daughter listen to music by a performer the parents deem inappropriate.  

So, Lucy arrives in New Ulm and freezes her heinie off because she didn't really understand what winter could be like, which leads to a lot of humorous moments, of course.  The manufacturing plant's secretary Blanche (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) sets her up with a rented house and invites her to dinner.  At dinner, Lucy disastrously judges, belittles, and alienates the labor union rep Ted (Harry Connick Jr.).

It takes about half a second for her to lock horns with the plant foreman Stu (J. K. Simmons) the next day too.  One of the things I like a lot about this movie is that nobody here is secretive about what their intentions are.  Lucy is sent here to try to keep the plant running by changing what it does.  Even though she's supposed to downsize the workforce, she's not secretly closing the plant -- the workers know why she's there.  And the workers aren't secretive about not wanting to be laid off.  It's a pretty open battle, for the most part.

Of course, Lucy thaws out literally and figuratively, warmed by the true kindness and hospitality of the New Ulm folks.  She falls in love with Ted.  She figures out how to save the manufacturing plant and all its jobs.  Everything winds up happily.  Yay!

Now, the point of the Seen on Screen blogathon is to watch a movie set in a real place you have actually visited and kind of compare them.  The real New Ulm is not a small manufacturing town the way it's portrayed in New in Town.  It's a city of 14,000 people with a college.  The college just happens to belong to the same Lutheran synod I do -- it's a teacher and pastor training college, in fact.  I've visited New Ulm five or six times, and the campus of that college twice.  While I don't have an intimate knowledge of New Ulm, I do know it well enough to know that the main street depicted in the film can't be actual New Ulm because the only streets in New Ulm that have sideways street parking like it shows are one-way streets.  But this was filmed in Canada, so, hey.  They do name-check the glockenspiel at one point, so the filmmakers get props for that, at least.  But not one shot did we get of Hermann the German.

Most of the ambience is just general Midwestern Normal circa the 2000s.  Ice fishing.  Football fervor.  Hockey.  Hunting.  Snow and blizzards and more snow.  They could have made up a name for the town and just made it be somewhere in Minnesota or Wisconsin and the movie would be the same.  I suppose they chose New Ulm because it's in the least ethnically diverse county in the USA -- as of the 2000 census, the county was 67% German-American and 97% white.  So you could cast a non-diverse bunch of actors and have it be "authentic" if you wanted to.  I don't know if that was really their plan, or if they just thought New Ulm sounded funny and archetypically Midwestern or something.  

The accents of the actors were something I worried a lot about, because Minnesota does have a pretty specific accent AND I lived there for five years, so a super hokey accent was probably going to be annoying.  Happily, they don't play too crazy with the accents.  New York native Siobhan Fallon Hogan has the most-pronounced accent, and it's really got more of a Northern Minnosota thing going on, but it's passable.  They didn't even try to have New Orleans native Harry Connick Jr. do a Minnesota accent, they just said his character moved there from North Carolina (he doesn't have a North Carolina accent either -- I lived in NC for ten years.  But he could have moved to NC from somewhere else, so whatever). The very best accent in the bunch is J. K. Simmons, which is not shocking because a) he's talented, b) he's a musician and singer, and accents can be very related to music, and c) he's a native Michigander.  Michigan is at least close enough to Minnesota that he probably has known some Minnesotans.  I actually looked Simmons up right after the movie because his accent was so good, I was wondering if he really was a Minnesotan.

Okay, probably nobody actually cared enough about Minnesota accents to read that whole paragraph.  Sorry.  It was interesting to me, anyway!

Over all, this movie does a decent job of portraying small town Upper Midwestern culture.  The one real misstep is how Blanche keeps talking to Lucy about Jesus.  Most Midwestern Christians will ask you if you have a church you go to.  If you don't, they'll just invite you to church over and over until you finally go with them.  Blanche talked more like a sweet Southern lady from the Bible Belt than a German-American Midwesterner in that respect.  I didn't have a problem with it, and they actually handled her religious beliefs very respectfully, I just don't think it was particularly true to life.

Is this movie family friendly?  Somewhat.  More family friendly than I was expecting, actually.  There is some suggestive dialog here and there.  There's a comic scene where Lucy discovers that your choice of bra is very important when you are in such a cold place, some visual comedy involving racy underwear being used as a distress flag, and some bad language.  There's a hunting accident with non-life-threatening injuries in an embarrassing location.  Alcohol use by adults is shown throughout.  And there is one make-out scene between two fully clothed adults that does not get uncomfortable to watch.  It is made clear they do not remove their clothes (or even unbutton them), and the fact that the romantic lead characters never jump into bed together is one of the things I love so much about this movie.

Check out the Seen on the Screen Blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room this weekend for more cool reviews of movies set in places that the reviewers have actually visited!