27 Dresses

Like the starlets of the movies she writes (Neve Campbell in Three to Tango, Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada), Aline Brosh McKenna is perfectly acceptable at what she does—talented, even—but is, at the end of the day, a slave to blandness.

The lead in her new 27 Dresses is Katherine Heigl (Knocked Up, Grey’s Anatomy), whose Barbie-like indistinctness is just barely acceptable on the big screen, but who succeeds, occasionally, at conveying an interesting frailty and demureness. Heigl’s character is Jane, a dreadfully single, marriage-obsessed New York workaholic who has been a bridesmaid, um, 27 times. She’s the kind of woman Doris Day would’ve played in her romcom heyday. That’s OK, though, for McKenna—who knows her Hollywood history backwards and forwards, as Prada’s ’40s-style office hijinks made clear—pairs her with Kevin (James Marsden), an ironic Rock Hudson–type who writes the Commitments column at the New York Journal but thinks marriage is really “nothing more than a corporate revenue stream.”

Initially, the two figures play off each other with a totally satisfying drollness: Kevin could teach Jane that marriage is a bourgeois sham, and Jane could teach Kevin that love—the classic cinematic kind, which comes, initially, from intellectually despising someone—isn’t entirely for the birds. McKenna knows she can and should make that happen, but doesn’t have the courage to dis the institution the film’s marketing machine is based on. And so, regardless of the pretty nifty comedy of errors McKenna sets up, in which both Jane and Kevin are revealed for the mean, misanthropic people they often are, 27 Dresses ends up being the fairy tale its deluded heroine wanted all along. Just sit back, enjoy the popcorn, and dream about your very own Vera Wang. WAIT FOR THE DVD

27 Dresses is now playing at Aurora (15460 Bayview Ave.), SilverCity Yonge & Eglinton (2300 Yonge St.) and Scotiabank Theatre Toronto (259 Richmond St. W.).