Movie Review - All About Steve

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In All About Steve, Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock) is a erudite creator of crossword puzzles.  While she has a vast knowledge, she is also socially inept; lost in her own world of obscure words and trivial facts.   She is incapable of discerning the non-verbal cues and subtleties of language that people use to politely dismiss each other.  This, combined with a frenzied personality and inability to stop talking, has resulted in her being friendless and single (despite the fact that she looks like Sandra Bullock).  When her parents set her up on a blind date she is initially reluctant until she discovers that Steve (Bradley Cooper) is dreamy.  Steve begins the evening interested, but Mary quickly queers the deal by being, well…Mary.  She throws herself at Steve the minute they leave the house.  Believing her to be relatively normal, Steve plays along.  However, upon realizing that she is a head-full-of-crazy, Steve stops mid-make out and politely excuses himself.  But Mary believes his excuses and assumes that he is a smitten with her as she is with him.  So she begins to follow Steve (who is a cameraman for a fictional news network) from assignment-to-assignment under the delusion that he has invited her.  She thinks they’re in love; he thinks she’s a stalker.

A film that appears to be pro-stalker is an interesting choice (to say the least) for celebrity of Bullock’s caliber.  One can’t help but imagine a day when one of her over-eager fans might play portions of this film at his or her trial.  Her character repeatedly misconstrues courteous rejection as lascivious provocations.  Every decision she makes, though sensible to her, only serves to make her seem more disturbed.  If the film hinges on Bullock’s performance then what we have here is decidedly “unhinged.”  Mary is meant to be bookish-but-sexy, quirky-but-cute, desperate-but-desirable.  But Bullock’s performance is frantic; full of odd walks, weird “happy dances” and unusual outfits.  The film offers shiny platitudes about acceptance but the more time you spend with Mary, the more you’ll come to believe that the script has seriously misjudged her.  This has nothing to do with tolerance.  She’s exactly the sort of person you should be afraid of.  She lacks the capacity for understanding the meaning of the word “no.”  If “Mary” were a “Michael” this movie would be marketed as a horror film.

The film feels as if it began life as an offbeat indie that was forced to jettison its eccentricities as big name stars began to come onboard.  When Paper Heart’s Charlyne Yi pops up (with all of one line) I was stricken with how much better the movie could have been with someone like her in the lead role.  Bullock, despite overacting her heart out, can’t overcome the fact that she’s “Sandra Bullock”.  She’s not believable as the odd-girl-out.  Her entire performance screams, “Look at me playing against type.”  Someone like Yi, with her twee peculiarities, straddles the line between crazy and cute.  She’s “out there” enough to do the sorts of things this film calls for without seeming deranged.

Late in the film Mary encounters what appears to be a kindred spirit in the visage of the equally unusual Howard (DJ Qualls).  For a brief moment expectations are raised as it seems that she might cast-off her quixotic quest for the titular Steve and gravitate towards someone that might actually appreciate her.  Unfortunately this was merely wishful thinking on my part.  As bad as Bullock’s performance is (and it’s bad) not all of the film’s flaws can be laid at her feet.  The script gives her nothing to work with.  The movie is laugh-free when it wants to be funny and laughable when it wants to be serious.  None of the jokes the work and none of its characters are believable.  All About Steve desperately wants to parable about acceptance and tolerance but spends the bulk of its time expecting us to laugh at someone that is most likely suffering from some sort of psychological disorder.  The filmmakers think it’s the height of hilarity that the film’s main character has the religiously paradoxical name “Mary Magdalene Horowitz” ala Juan Epstein.  And when you start ripping-off Welcome Back, Kotter, you’ve got serious problems.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being The King of Comedy and 1 being Single White Female 2: The Psycho, All About Steve gets a 2.

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