ALL ABOUT STEVE (2009)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Sandra Bullock plays Mary Horowitz, a very astute crossword puzzle writer for a small Sacramento newspaper. She is knowledgeable on all facts about every town in America. She also lives with her parents and her best friend is a hamster. Her parents have set her up on a blind date with a news cameraman, the charming Steve (Bradley Cooper). Mary is hoping he is not gay and they practically undress in his jeep before even going to a restaurant. Unfortunately, the sexual romp in the hay is cut short when Steve is called in to work at the TV station (of course, he fakes it since he wants out of any entanglement whatsoever. It used to be that a first date would be a date that lasted through the evening. Now, we live in a world where the date is not given half of a chance beyond the first meet cute moment). There are already problems with this scene: A.) It is not believable and hardly sincere. Cooper's Steve is initially taken by Mary, then he loves the fact that she promptly wants sex and then dumps her because she talks too much. B.) It serves as a contrivance to further a plot that makes little sense. How could anyone believe that people behave this way? Well, Steve doesn't exactly dump her but allows an open invitation, albeit insincerely, to his whereabouts. Mary buys it without questioning anything - just because the guy gives you his umbrella doesn't mean he wants you. Oh, and there is that dreadful crossword puzzle about Steve cooked up by Mary that nobody can solve, thus causing her to lose her job.
Mary travels by bus where she annoys the driver so much, she is thrown out. A kind truck driver (M. C. Gainey) is one of the few that puts up with her long enough to drop her off at her destination. Meanwhile, we get a bunch of scenes of an anxious news reporter, Hartman Hughes (Thomas Haden Church) who wants to be anchor and keeps screwing it up. Church's scenes with Steve and Ken Jeong as a field producer are actually very funny and one wishes the movie would be about them. Mixing in Mary into the proceedings, when the movie can never decide if she is a stalker or an insane person or neither, doesn't jell at all. By the end of the film, Mary is just as likely to be misunderstood which is a definite cop-out.
The film is not any worse than its reputation might indicate. Bullock does her best to play a seemingly complicated, good-natured character who is not given many complications except in her sincere desire to be with the supposed man of her dreams. When something out of left field is dropped on us, a manhole that Mary and a group of deaf children accidentally fall into, I wondered what I was supposed to take away from all this. As the film ends, you will wonder something that I do not ponder about after seeing a David Lynch film: What the hell was that all about?
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