Ok, so imagine it’s 1953, you’re a woman and you have no skills other than being a wealthy man’s wife. Not the skills of a mother, mind you, but the skills of a wife used to having enough money to be able to pay someone else to raise your children. Eventually, your husband’s womanizing habits become too much for you, so you decide to take your children (after figuring out where in the world they are) and strike off on your own. What you would experience next would probably very closely resemble what happens to Anne Deveraux (Renee Zelweger) and the two boys, George (Logan Lerman) and Robbie (Mark Rendall). They not only re-create the 1950’s physically in My One and Only, but socially as well.

Anne comes home early one day to find her husband Dan (Kevin Bacon) – a lounge singer still riding the wave of success following his one and only hit song, “My One and Only” – in bed with a girl who can’t be more than half his age. To teach him a lesson, she finally decides to end their marriage and take off on her own with George and Robbie, who are half-brothers from two of Dan’s marriages. We never learn much (anything) about Robbie’s mother, but his homosexuality suggests that he should care about her more than he ever lets on. Anne’s naivete and lack of experience in the real world leads her to believe that she can just buy a brand new car and go out and find herself another man as rich but more loyal than her husband.

Her apparent first discovery about real life comes in the form of a series of unsuccessful interviews with former boyfriends in the hope that one of them will be a good candidate for a future husband.

Hmm, bottle or wife...bottle or wife...

None are even close, but it’s when she starts trying to find someone new that she really begins to understand the gravity of the situation she’s in. She is hit on by an overweight but well-to-do man at a bar who takes her home but comes on too strong in the car, and she ends up getting thrown out of his car and into the street while her son George watches from a window. Growing desperation leads her to approach a man at a bar, only to find herself being arrested by him for solicitation. And all this is before she even tries her unskilled hand at actually finding a job!

Renee Zelweger inhabits her character perfectly, portraying with impressive precision the conflicting parts of her character. She presents Anne as a terrible mother but a dedicated one, someone totally inexperienced but determined, confident but barely hiding a powerful sadness. Logan Lerman is perfect as George, who is skeptical about the whole excursion despite seeming to understand that his parents can’t be together. He knows their divorce is inevitable, but isn’t sure if he should stay with his mother or go back to his father. But it’s Mark Rendall as the unapologetically gay brother who steals the show. I have no idea if Rendall is actually gay, but he gives one of the most impressive performances of a gay character in recent memory, because it’s both subtle and convincing. This is not an easy mark for an actor to hit, gay or not.

But despite an array of impressive performances, including a sleazy turn by Kevin Bacon and a spot-on performance from the hilarious David Koechner as a paint company owner who almost becomes Anne’s dream husband, My One and Only is still a Renee Zelweger movie. It’s based on the life of real life actor George Hamilton and the inadvertent way that he got into the world of acting. I don’t know how accurate the story is but it’s believable and classy and director Richard Loncraine and his production crew make it all feel almost palpably real. And the screenwriting is fantastic.

I will admit that the ending of the movie comes dangerously close to highly incongruous cheesiness, but the movie works wonderfully as a road movie about a mother and her sons at a difficult point in their lives but on their way to something better, wherever that may be. It’s not the funniest comedy and it’s not the most dramatic drama, but it has an undeniable aesthetic appeal and a feeling of having been made with a healthy dose of reminiscent love, and such things should never go unappreciated.

The Bean Meter