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SWEET NOVEMBER Send This Review to a Friend
Charlize Theron is so enjoyable to watch that she even survives this very contrived, overly sentimental, unabashed effort at tear-jerking. Once was not enough for this plot, the basis of the 1968 film of the same title that teamed Sandy Dennis and Anthony Newley. Here we go again.
Keanu Reeves plays Nelson Moss, an all-work-no play San Francisco ad man, who is a hot shot trying to land a big new account. He and Sara Deever (Theron) meet cute, in Holywood parlance, and she adopts him as her November lover. Each month she takes a different guy. There's a reason you can count on learning. Her mission with Nelson is to change his lifestyle so he learns how to appreciate the more meaningful things, such as her and leisure.
Even granted that Reeves must show a turnabout, his behavior at the start is so cold and obnoxious that it is hard to believe Sara would see anything attractive in him that would make her want to bother. But that's the least of the problems with "Sweet November." You don't have to be astute to figure that Sara is hiding something, which becomes apparent when we watch her become ill and rely on medication.
The plot also contains Sara's gay friend and confidant who, along with his companion, cross-dress at a dinner and a fatherless boy in the neighborhood who looks to Nelson for friendship and a role as a substitute dad. By the time the cluttered soap opera runs out of suds, and director Pat O'Connor has milked everything he can from Kurt Voelker's script based on Herman Raucher's 1968 screenplay, there is the thoroughly unconvincing ending that leaves Mr. November a changed man shown the way to live in the future by the woman who…well, why should you be told the ending without having to suffer through it yourself. Pass the tissues. A Warner Brothers release.
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