Targeted Audience

Today's film offered for consideration is The Sweetest Thing (2002), clearly intended as a fluff piece from conception through execution. It is fair to say that this film is even more of a vacation from deep thought than Blades of Glory, another recently reviewed comedy.

The movie that does spring to mind for me by way of comparison is Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion (1997), a film characterized by one commentator as a bimbo movie. Though the two films have radically different philosophical points of view, (i.e., "messages",) they share the fundamental premise of heterosexual girlfriends at play, complete with outrageous road trip sequences. The male characters ultimately valorized share the characteristics of sweetness and of impressive financial success. Beyond that, the tales diverge significantly.

The Sweetest Thing (TST) features Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, and Selma Blair (Legally Blonde) as San Francisco roommates who are successful career women by day and active nightclub scene players by night. They are presented as sexually active thirty-somethings who evidently lack any behavioral boundaries whatsoever, even as it becomes increasingly evident that they are quite rigidly confined by the relational boundaries they have established in order to survive "the Game" of easy sex and casual relationships.

According to comments posted on imdb.com and supported by the two supplementary shorts included on the dvd, this film is not intended as a serious work with any deep message. That certainly seems to be the case, for the conversion of the party girl played by Cameron Diaz to a vibrant young woman looking for love (in all the wrong places) requires some serious suspension of disbelief. Evidently all that is required is a comedy of errors supplemented by a seriously lame self-help book's pronouncements. There are no consequences for her prior behavior, no wake-up call to clean up her act. What one does see is Christina Applegate's character coming to see the light through observation of her friends' follies. Of course, as she is a lawyer, one might arguably ascribe to her a greater ability to learn by observation than is evident in her friends.

Overall, the film has an Animal House entertainment quality to it without the invitation to root for any underdog. Yes, the raunchiness has its own form of appeal, but rooting for older mean girls still isn't quite as satisfactory for me as rooting for underdogs. Not even The Punisher (Thomas Jane) requires satisfaction from these women of privilege. Beyond the entertainment and the invitations to snicker, that little detail keeps nagging at the back of this viewer's consciousness.