 Jersey Girl is being touted as the last film to benefit from the Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez blare, one that could straighten Affleck's wobbly career, and as director Kevin Smith's first "grown-up" effort. Critics disagree wildly about whether it succeeds on any of those counts. On the one hand Stephen Holden writes in the New York Times: "Mr. Smith has made a movie so false and blatantly icky that it's the film equivalent of making goo-goo noises and chucking a baby under the chin for 103 minutes." Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer warns that "say practically oozes from the screen." Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News remarks that Smith "has relied on every hoary cliche of the romantic melodrama in a mundane yarn about a man brought low by tragedy and raised up by the love of a child wise beyond her years." And Kenneth Turan warns in the Los Angeles Times: "Imagine a Shirley Temple movie written and directed by Lenny Bruce ... with key plot points involving pornography and masturbation, and you'll get an idea of what writer-director Kevin Smith has come up with in Jersey Girl." On the other hand, Mike Clark in USA Today concludes: "Smith is looking more and more like a developing major talent. ... The film is not only defensible as a cute one-shot, but also as a positive sign for the future." Lisa Kennedy likewise concludes that the film is "a small movie with a big star doing some of his most appealing work. And that's no small feat." Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News recommends that "Smith should continue to mine family life. It suits him." And Eric Harrison concludes in the Houston Chronicle that Jersey Girl is Smith's "first mature work in which he weds his gift for quirky dialogue and humor with genuine feeling and tries to craft a story with broad appeal." |
