New in Town (2009)

There is a moment in New in Town when a Miami executive named Lucy Hill arrives in New Ulm, Minnesota, and discovers that the locals eat tapioca pudding and speak with accents. This is presented as a revelation. The film, directed by Jonas Elmer and released in 2009, follows the well-worn contours of the fish-out-of-water romance with the diligence of a tax preparer. Renée Zellweger performs the role of the ambitious professional woman with a dimpled intensity that critics at the time found exhausting, and the picture went on to earn a modest $29 million against its $8 million budget, a return that suggests the audience for this sort of thing is small but reliable.

The picture carries a quiet pro-labor streak that deserves acknowledgment. A corporation intends to shutter the plant, install Japanese automation, and dismiss half the workforce, and the resolution arrives in the form of an employee-owned cooperative, financed by a group of investors who gradually transfer ownership to the workers. This is a genuine anti-corporate fantasy dressed in cardigan and snow boots. It never lectures. The messaging stays buried beneath ice fishing and a widower's daughter preparing for her first dance, which is to the film's credit as entertainment and to its detriment as anything resembling a statement.

On the matter of diverse casting, the film offers a nearly uniform white Minnesota populace, with the Japanese machinery functioning as an off-screen plot device rather than a human presence. Lucy eventually ascends to the chief executive's chair, a detail that flatters without arguing. The result is a film of mild social awareness and no preaching whatsoever, a relic of a gentler commercial era that asked very little of its audience and received exactly that in return.