Posted: 12/15/2002

Maid in Manhattan

(2002)

by Coco Delgado

Is this Pretty Woman for J-Lo? By the time the credits roll, will we care or even remember?

Of all the things that were in Pandora’s box, Hope was the most vicious. You see, hope makes you believe things are possible…that things can happen. Hope is a false friend and not one to be trusted in the slightest. Hope’s idea of a fun time is to send you, like Icarus, soaring sunwards, only to melt your feathers off and send you crashing to the cold hard earth…Hope is a drug with a very temporary high. And the movies are the biggest pushers.

You can’t blame them, of course. No one really wants to see a depressing movie about sad desperate everyday lives (Mike Leigh films notwithstanding); they can stay at home and live them. People want something uplifting…Especially during the holidays. Thus, Maid in Manhattan came to be released 12 days before Christmas.

And it’s a lovely Cinderella story, prettily directed by Wayne Wang, who showcases Manhattan and the Bronx the way he showcased San Francisco in The Joy Luck Club. This is a fairy tale, and I think we all knew months and months ago, back when we saw the first preview, how it was going to end.

Basically, it’s the story of a maid, Jennifer Lopez, and a State Assemblyman, Ralph Fiennes, who fall in love at first sight (of course, he thinks she’s a wealthy guest) and for whom it all seems to work out. Because it must, you see…because Cinderella always gets her Prince. Because this is is Cinderella, plain and simple. Right down to her getting an outfit put together by a Fairy Godmother (in this case, all her friends at the Hotel Beresford, played with understated wit by the Waldorf-Astoria) and going to the Ball.In this case, Cinderella happens to be a Hispanic single mother with an excruciatingly adorable Nixon-worshiping, 70s-obsessed, gifted son, but hey, this is America.

Oh, it tries to be about the little people moving on up. It has nice preaching, mainly by Bob Hoskins as a butler, about how what we do doesn’t define who we are, and how, no matter how lowly our crap jobs are, someday, if we are very good and do what we’re supposed to do, we can join the ranks Management. It’s a subplot at best. Another little boost of hope for all of us little people stuck in crap jobs. Hey, not only can you meet the man/woman/other of your dreams, but you can get that job you’ve always wanted. All you have to do is align the teapot handles parallel to your arms on the tray and wrap the wine bottle tightly.

I was amused, however, at the way the lead characters’ careers helped define their personalities. A politician must always say and do the right thing, and is more concerned with the way things appear than with how they really are. A maid must be invisible: this is reinforced in the “backstage at the hotel” scenes with worker slogan signs which read “Strive to be invisible” and “I don’t speak, I don’t think, I don’t know.” But of course, our characters, being ‘Above All That,’ flaunt these conventions and think for themselves. Which is why we like them, of course.

Of course, there’s the obligatory rocky part, wherein Lopez loses the man and her job, but she quickly gets hired on as a maid at the Roosevelt Hotel (Playing itself in a cameo), and her son cuts school (gasp!) to convince Fiennes to give his mom a second chance…and everyone lives happily ever after.

And the world’s a little prettier and those love songs make more sense when we leave the dusky theatre and step out into the sunshine…at least until the high wears off and we go back for another dose of narcotic happy endings. C’mon. Try it. The first one’s free…

Coco Delgado is a writer who always sits in the front row. For fun she moves to different cities, which have included Montreal, San Francisco and Atlanta. Currently it’s Boston.

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