“My Life in Ruins” is like a good-looking person that you feel you should be attracted to, but just aren’t. It has a lot of potential, but, like the garish montage of Greek postcards that opens it, the result is just plain corny. Here, Nia Vardalos has wandered too far from the comic yet poignant niche she carved out for herself when she wrote and starred in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”
In “My Life in Ruins,” Georgia (Vardalos) goes to Greece to be a professor of classical history, but is stuck working as a tour guide when she loses her job. The film traffics in ethnic stereotypes that are only sometimes humorous. Apparently, filmmaker Donald Petrie and screenwriter Mike Reiss’s idea of the United Nations includes Spanish seductresses in push-up bras, capitalist Americans (including an IHOP entrepreneur so dull that even the bartender has to drink, who continues to expound on the history of syrup even after Georgia has gone to sleep on a bed of napkins), and boozed up, incomprehensible Australians. The only ones who get off easy in this ethnic spoof are the Canadians. That’s not to say that the deft wielding of cultural jabs can’t be funny when it’s done right. When it’s done wrong, however, you get jokes that are obnoxious without the reward of laughter.
Not surprisingly, the motley tour group is indifferent to Georgia’s considerable knowledge of the places they visit in Greece. What they do care about are cell phones, air conditioning, and shopping. The main message of the movie seems to be that history, knowledge, and culture (outside of cultural stereotype) are boring, if not downright depressing. The solution? Sex, ice cream, and souvenirs! What the film does succeed in communicating is an almost visceral sense of how frustrating it must be to try to share the layers of Greek history with rude tourists who would mistake a religious relic for a snack bowl (yes, this does actually occur in the movie).
The main reason for the discrepancy between “My Life in Ruins” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” is that the former seems to take apart everything that the latter stood for; if “Greek Wedding” showed women that they don’t have to sacrifice their quirkiness and integrity in order to be happy in life and love, “My Life” has slowly deconstructed this premise. Throughout the film, Georgia transforms (apparently through a good old fashioned dose of sex) from a woman who is labeled uptight—actually as "tight as my Aunt Gladys’s ass,” to be precise, and by Richard Dreyfus, no less--because she values her career, to someone who throws away the professor job she hankers over for most of the movie in exchange for a declaration of love from the hairy bus driver who transforms, like a dutiful Hollywood Cinderello, into an Armani model. Sure, she can be a bit unlikable at times, but at least pre-coital Georgia has backbone and aspirations.
The film is so fixated on sex and consumerism that Irv (Dreyfus as the lovable old jokester who serves up the film's humanity) could have written the movie’s tagline when he urges Georiga to tell more dirty stories from the annals of history because “sex sells.” Well, we’ll see if they’ve piled on enough of it to float this one at the box office.
--Caroline Hagood
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