"Confessions of a Shopaholic" is a difficult movie to stomach if you are of any of the following persuasions: a New Yorker, a compulsive shopper, a reader of a financial magazine, a person in credit card debt, a person without a job, a small-apartment dweller or someone who is not gorgeous. Taking place, as it does, in "movie New York," with its glittering two-roommate lofts and glamorous magazine offices, "Confessions" requires the kind of suspension of disbelief that would get a screenwriter for an Astaire/Rogers movie fired.
The lasting image is Isla Fisher in an enormous walk-in closet in Manhattan, having just become internationally famous and complaining to her beautiful roommate that another rich and famous magazine writer has everything. Well, who doesn't?
The shopaholic, Rebecca Bloomwood, is a young magazine reporter with massive credit card debt who lucks into a job at "Successful Saver" magazine after a single drunken night of joblessness. She's an instant success, becoming famous in a way that few writers who avoid sexy vampires ever become, and falls in love with the handsome editor of the magazine, who also loves her. In the middle of that there might be a movie, but all of this happens in 45 minutes. No time for conflict.
Eventually her debts catch up to her and she's caught in the debt collector's horn-rimmed sights, but only long enough for the handsome editor to rescue her. It's a movie about how movie heroines are impervious to harm, without a whit of even the most basic will-they-won't-they romantic comedy suspense. The climactic auction wanted only Mickey Rooney to become an "Andy Hardy" let's-put-on-a-show finale.
Fisher is a capable comedian, falling all over herself a little better than the usual romantic comedy leads in those obligatory I'm-a-beautiful-klutz moments, but the script, adapted from the chick-lit standard of the same name by Sophie Kinsella, gives her little to do when she's not tripping over things. Most of the time she's a shrill, insecure presence in the center of scenes, forced to make something up or say something she doesn't understand to keep up the charade of her financial expertise. Julie Hagerty and John Goodman, among other excellent comedic character actors, don't have much to do either, but they do it well. That's the movie, writ small: some good parts, in the form of cameos and set-pieces, but little in the way of form or plot to make a movie out of them.
Like its heroine, "Confessions of a Shopaholic" escapes substantial trouble because there's nothing substantial about it -- it's a mess, but it's the kind of mess that's so light it floats out of the way of any real criticism. What's there is poorly constructed and manages all the verisimilitude and emotional depth of "Transformers," but as a picture about shopping and lucking into a lot of money and a hot guy it's hard to muster 500 words about it, let alone a thousand.
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