My One and Only

My One and Only (2009) comes out of a childhood the actor George Hamilton actually lived. He told these stories to producers for years before they became a film. It is 1953. Ann Deveraux catches her bandleader husband with another woman, takes her two sons, and drives out of New York. She has a Cadillac and a plan: visit her old suitors one by one and settle with whichever one takes her. Boston, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis, Los Angeles. What is funny about the film is the mother's confidence. What is sad about it is that the plan fails at every stop. The younger son takes notes the whole way, and by the end you realise what you have been watching is the observation that turned him into a writer. Renée Zellweger plays the part without tipping into caricature. Ann is not stupid, she is simply committed to the only strategy she has. It is not a major film and it did poorly at the box office. As a road story it is warm, and the period design is careful. It runs 108 minutes. Good for: road movies, period comedy, and mother and son stories. Less good for: the dialogue carries sexual implication, and the pace is slow and episodic.