Monster-in-Law (2005)

Monster-in-Law arrives as a tidy specimen of the mid-2000s studio romantic comedy, a machine assembled from familiar parts and lubricated by Jane Fonda's return to the screen after fifteen years away. Jennifer Lopez plays Charlie, a Venice Beach temp and aspiring fashion designer who falls for a surgeon, and Fonda plays Viola, the mother who would sooner see the wedding cancelled than surrender her son. The plotting is broad, the pacing is brisk, and the whole enterprise carries the faint odor of a contract negotiation. It grossed $155 million against a $43 million budget, which tells us what the critics could not: audiences were content.

On the question of modern social consciousness, the film offers flickers and nothing more. Lopez headlines and Wanda Sykes appears in support, yet the casting reads as star-vehicle arithmetic from 2005, and Sykes is handed the sassy assistant, a comedic type with a long and weary pedigree. The only gay content is a misunderstanding in which Charlie is led to believe Kevin is gay, a gag rather than a theme. Viola's ouster from her anchor chair by a younger woman gestures at media ageism, though the film's engine remains the bride against the mother-in-law. Race is never a subject. The rich-family, poor-temp friction is played for snobbery and social awkwardness, not as any indictment of capital.

Where the film is silent, it is entirely silent. No environmental content, no historical revisionism, no meditation on the body beyond an allergic-reaction swelling gag that works in precisely the opposite direction. Viola's breakdown and her antipsychotic medication are plot mechanics and punchlines. The closing beat, in which the women set boundaries and ground rules, resolves the farce without ever climbing onto a soapbox. This is a comedy that wants nothing from us but a laugh and a ticket stub, and it pursues that goal with a single-mindedness that borders on the admirable. The sommelier's note: thin, fizzy, faintly synthetic, best served cold.