Rumor Has It... (HD DVD)

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Despite an intriguing premise and the engaging presence of Kevin Costner, Jennifer Aniston, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Ruffalo, Kathy Bates, and Mena Suvari, 2005's "Rumor Has It..." did not fare as well as expected at the box office. The film took in about $42,000,000, which is hardly small potatoes, but given the talent involved, the receipts probably didn't add up to as much as the movie's production costs. Although it's not a bad film, the box office take may be a good indication of the film's overall merits.

Warner Bros. have released the movie in three configurations on three individual discs, purchased separately. They've made it available in standard-definition fullscreen and widescreen, and in the HD-DVD and DVD Combo reviewed here. More about that in a minute.

First, why might the movie have not done as well as the studio had hoped? Well, aside from its not being the funniest or most touching romantic comedy of all time, it works on a premise with which not everyone may be familiar. "Rumor Has It..." is about a young woman, played by Ms. Aniston, who discovers that the writer of the famous novel (and movie) "The Graduate" may have based his story on her own family! Now, this makes a clever throwback to the older film, but I wonder if anyone in the Hollywood community realized that many young people today don't really know all that much about "The Graduate" beyond its title? I raised the question of "The Graduate" a few years ago with my film classes, and I found that while most of the students recognized the title, almost none of them (about sixty-five juniors and seniors) had ever seen the film. I mean, how would they? Yes, "The Graduate" is a famous motion picture; but it was made in 1967. How many young people in their teens and twenties (who make up a big percentage of the viewing public) would rent or buy "The Graduate"? It's not a recent blockbuster, after all. And it doesn't show up on television very often. I'd be willing to bet that many of you (presumably film fans) reading this review right now either have never seen "The Graduate" or saw it so long ago you can't remember much about it.

So you get a movie like "Rumor Has It..." that relies heavily on an audience's knowledge of a previous film, and when that knowledge is lacking, the new movie may seem rather shallow. Worse, audiences that are familiar with the older film are likely to make comparisons and remember how much better "The Graduate" was than this new extension. Anyway, in fairness the new film, within the context of its goings on, does try to provide some background material on the subject matter of the older film; but it's not like having the seen the older film and remembering it well.

I understand that at one point the filmmakers had wanted Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman to reprise their original "Graduate" roles, but Ms. Brancroft passed away and Hoffman was too busy. So the parts went to Shirley MacLaine and Kevin Costner, who were about a decade too young for the characters (some forty years had passed since the happenings in "The Graduate," after all). As a result, the filmmakers set "Rumor Has It..." in 1997, keeping the actors' real ages more in line with the characters they were playing. Of course, the actors in the first movie were supposed to be playing other, real-life people, and the actors in the new movie are supposed to be those real-life people, so it doesn't matter that the two sets of actors don't look exactly alike. (Does that make sense? I'm not sure even I followed what I just said.)

Rob Reiner directed "Rumor Has It...," and the film marks a general downward trend in his ability to come up with genuine laughs or genuine emotions. In the first phase of his directorial career, it seemed like he could do no wrong: "This Is Spinal Tap," "Stand By Me," "The Princess Bride," "A Few Good Men," "The American President," and one of the best romantic comedies of all time, "When Harry Met Sally." But Reiner's last few films have been less than spectacular: "North," "Alex & Emma," "The Two of Us."

I don't mean to imply that "Rumor Has It..." is awful. As I said at the start, it's got a clever premise and an engaging cast. It's just that the story doesn't take either one of them very far.

You may remember that in "The Graduate" young Ben Braddock, just out of college, slept with both an older woman, Mrs. Robinson, and the woman's college-aged daughter. Was it fiction? Or was it based on a real-life situation? Well, rumor has it....

Jennifer Aniston plays Sarah Huttinger, who returns home from New York to Pasadena with her lawyer boyfriend, Jeff (Mark Ruffalo), to attend her younger sister's wedding. The younger sister, Annie (Mena Suvari), is an airhead marrying a guy with whom she enjoys playing tennis.

Sarah is looking for more adventure in life than her fiancée or her dead-end newspaper job can provide, and when she sees her conservative father and his conservative Pasadena friends, she gets even more depressed. At the wedding, she overhears things (that in her thirty-odd years she never noticed until now) that lead her to suspect that maybe her relatives were the inspirations that lead an old family friend, Charles Webb, to write his novel "The Graduate." Like, maybe her father (played by the wonderful character actor Richard Jenkins) is not her real father at all; like maybe her mother, who died when she was a child, slipped away with somebody else before marrying her dad....

Aunt Mitzi (an uncredited Kathy Bates), Sarah's mother's best friend, tells Sarah about a fellow named Beau Burroughs (Costner), with whom the mother had a fling before getting married. Could it be? Could Beau Burroughs and the book's "fictional" Benjamin Braddock be one and the same? And could Beau have also had a real-life affair with Sarah's grandmother, Katherine (Shirley MacLaine), a real-life Mrs. Robinson? "Things are never what they seem with the women in this family," says Katherine, who provides the single biggest spark in the picture.