In Her Shoes

The thing that stuck with me after seeing In Her Shoes: This has to be the longest chick flick ever. OK, so that may not be a statement of fact, but at two hours and 10 minutes, a good editing could have improved the butt-numbing factor.

'In Her Shoes' is the alternately hilarious and heart-rending story of two sisters, Maggie and Rose Feller with nothing in common but size 8 feet.

In Her Shoes, based on the novel of the same name, is about two sisters: Rose (Toni Collette, Muriel’s Wedding), the ugly but smart one, and Maggie (Cameron Diaz), the pretty but self-destructive one. The novel/movie’s name stems from Rose’s obsessive shoe collection. When she gets down, which is apparently often, clothes don’t look right and food only makes her fatter, but shoes “always fit.” It’s a nice idea, if only Rose was even remotely fat. Of course, next to Diaz’s concave stomach (and there are plenty of shots of Diaz’s skin, just to make sure the men in the audience aren’t falling asleep), a Kleenex looks fat. The one mitigating factor is that when Collette laughs, she has more than a passing resemblance to a horse.

As children, the sisters were close, but Maggie’s illiteracy keeps her from holding a job, and she ends up on Rose’s couch, subsequently screwing Rose’s boyfriend. Rose’s compassion takes a dive in the face of her own blown self-esteem, and she kicks Maggie out, come what may.

It takes us half the movie to get to this point, but things finally start to happen. Maggie goes in search of the sisters’ long-lost grandma and Rose, a lawyer, quits her job to walk dogs for a living and falls for Simon (Mark Feuerstein).

Getting to the crux of the movie — the sisters’ realizations that they are two halves of a whole — is long in coming, but overall, the sentiment is sweet, and both women are likable, if a little over the top on the stereotype scale. Shirley MacLaine plays Grandma, a tough but fair older woman who has her own issue from the past that haunts her.

This is the kind of movie that is best enjoyed after a few drinks with the girls. While a higher caliber of chick flick, chick flick it remains. Just hit the restroom before you sit down.