I was born in a small town outside of Chicago, Illinois, or at least it was small when I came into the world.  In many respects, it is unrecognizable from how it once looked.  The hospital in which I debuted in the center of the village is practically a city unto itself.  Long gone is Frank’s Finer Foods where my sister and I used to fight for the right to ride in the bottom of the cart.  More recently gone is John’s Place, a local bar and restaurant owned by a childhood friend of my dad.  It may be different, but I still think of it as home.  I may not desire to go through another winter in that place, but it calls me back every once in a while like a migratory bird knowing the exact pond next to which it was hatched, returning to it to repeat the process.  Put simply, it holds a special place in my heart.  Instead, I live in a warmer and more urbanized locale, which has its advantages.  Today’s film, New in Town (2009), does things in the opposite way as me, but I enjoyed it all the same.

Lucy Hill (Renée Zellweger) is not yet New in Town when the film begins.  Rather, she is an up-and-coming executive in a food corporation headquartered in Miami, Florida.  Donald Arling (Robert Small), Lucy’s boss, is looking to automate their plant in Ulm, Minnesota, and downsize its workforce by fifty percent.  Because none of the other underlings gathered are keen on traveling to the frozen North from the tropical South, and seeing it as an opportunity to advance her career, Lucy volunteers to be the one to oversee the transition.  The Florida native is in for a brutally cold greeting when she arrives, and I do not just mean the weather.  To be fair, her welcoming committee, headed by the plant’s secretary Blanche Gunderson (Siobahn Fallon Hogan), is plenty hospitable.  Blanche and the rest arrange a house for Lucy to live in, and invite their new manager to dinner at the Gunderson’s on her first night.  In the first interaction between Blanche and Lucy, it is revealed that Lucy is single.  Thus, at that initial gathering, Blanche invites Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick Jr.).  There is a business angle to this pairing, Ted being the representative for the union that operates the plant.  This last fact is not revealed during the meal.  Instead, it ends with Lucy and Ted getting in an argument and abruptly excusing themselves from the table.  This is not common practice in these parts, dontcha know.  Ted’s role is revealed the next day when Lucy goes to the plant for her first day on the job.  It is at this point that she also meets Stu Kopenhafer (J. K. Simmons).  His is the foreman, and he is none too pleased to have another corporate lackey in their midst because it inevitably leads to fewer jobs for the people of Ulm.  Of course, when Lucy addresses the staff as a whole, she says nothing about the planned layoffs.  Instead, it is couched in terms like streamlining the operation and modernization.  Stu sees through the company line.  When Lucy comes to him for a concession, he makes up a holiday as a bargaining chip to get the machinery updated.  As she goes out around the town that day, it becomes evident that it had been a ruse to get everyone a day off.  In turn, she fires the foreman.  Also on her list of employees to let go is Blanche, who means well but is not the most efficient worker.  Still, despite her desire to remain aloof and get back to Miami as soon as possible, it is people like Blanche that begin to soften Lucy’s feelings on the place.  It also helps that she attempted to return to Miami for a weekend and was thwarted by the Minnesota winter.  On the way back to Ulm, she swerves to miss a cow and careens off road into a snow bank.  She is found that night by Ted, who manages to get her home.  These acts of kindness make her realize that she should be more thankful to the people around her.  Blanche is high on that list.  So, too, is Ted.  One of the ways Lucy makes up for Ted’s good deed is by taking his teenaged daughter, Bobbie Mitchell (Ferron Guerreiro), to get properly prepared for her first dance.  While Bobbie is out, Lucy and Ted begin to share intimacies of the physical and verbal kind, which only makes it awkward when Bobbie comes home sooner than expected.  It is nothing too physical, though, if you get my meaning.  As for the task Lucy is there to complete, her endearing to the folk means that she is behind schedule.  This leads to a summons to Miami.  While she is prepared to defend her actions to Donald, she is caught by surprise when he instead says that they are going to entirely shut down the plant.  Further, when Lucy asks Blanche to find something in Lucy’s desk, Blanche also spots the list of names she had been compiling to be terminated.  Blanche’s name is near the top.  Upon Lucy’s return, Blanche handles it in that wonderfully kind, Midwestern manner, but it is evident that she is hurt.  The same can be said for Ted.  To make matters worse, she has to tell everyone that they are all about to lose their jobs.  Yet, that night, while eating some of Blanche’s secret recipe tapioca pudding, Lucy has some inspiration.  Contrary to closing down operations, she gets Blanche to share her method of making the desert, rallies the town, gets Stu his old job back, and makes amends with Ted.  They are so successful that not long after Lucy has her triumph in Miami, the company decides to put the new brand up for sale.  This last shocker is mitigated, though, when Lucy gets together an investment team to make the purchase, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after.

New in Town is set in what is supposed to by a comical part of the Midwest: rural Minnesota.  To be fair, much of the comedy is supposed to be related to the weather.  I am sure that those of you who have experience with such temperatures will understand when I say that in those situations, if you could not laugh you would cry.  However, the frigid air is not the only thing that is sent up for laughs.  Much of the culture is, too, and this includes the Christian faith.  One of the first things Blanche asks Lucy is if her new boss has found Jesus.  It is asked matter-of-factly, though Lucy takes it as a joke.  Because of Blanche’s accent, dress, and penchant for scrap-booking, her faith is part of a state-of-mind that is meant to be seen as backwards.  As a practicing Catholic who reviews movies, this is frustrating and nothing new.  All the same, the film is not a total loss in the faith department.  One of the more beautiful scenes is around Christmas time when Lucy is beckoned from her house to take to the streets with the rest of the town as they sing “O Come Let Us Adore Him.”  They could have used any seasonally appropriate music, but they chose a tune that specifically references the reason we celebrate the holiday in the first place: the birth of Jesus.  I wish I could say this is carried to its logical extent. Unfortunately, the procession terminates at a Christmas tree adorned only with lights instead of ending in a church, for some reason.  I guess nothing is perfect.

I happened to briefly glance at some of the reviews for New in Town.  They are not pretty.  They are also accurate to a degree.  The main complaint is that the film is a by-the-numbers romantic comedy.  There is no denying this fact.  Nonetheless, I found it to be passable.