Susan Granger’s review of “MICKEY BLUE EYES” (Warner Bros.)
Just imagine you’re a suave, proper British auctioneer who’s madly in love with an exuberant New York schoolteacher you’ve known for only three months, so in love, in fact, that you propose marriage – only to have her burst into tears and run away. That’s what happens to Hugh Grant at the beginning of the story. Jeanne Tripplehorn refuses to marry him because she’s worried about what will happen if he joins her dysfunctional Mafia family. Undaunted, he goes to Little Italy to find her father – that’s James Caan – at his restaurant, “The La Trattoria,” where the song “We Are Family” plays in the background as he meets the wiseguys. Sure enough, before the bumbling Brit knows it, his auction gallery is being used for mob money laundering and the FBI is paying a visit. The scene where the gregarious Caan tries to teach the refined Grant the goombah enunciation of “fuhgeddaboutit” is a gem. One complication leads to another and soon he becomes known as “Mickey Blue Eyes” by all the wrong people. Screenwriters Adam Scheinman and Robert Kuh and director Kelly Makin deliver the humorous, if clich?-ridden set-ups, but what makes the frenzied farce work is Hugh Grant, who seems to have inherited Cary Grant’s ability to maintain an unflappable charm and graceful dignity no matter how humiliating the circumstances. Whether he’s a boyish “Notting Hill” book seller who falls for a movie star or a proper, innocent Englishman who behaves with aplomb when finds himself with a bloody corpse, Grant handles his fish-out-of-water roles with witty, sophisticated charm, adept at both verbal sparring and physical antics. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Mickey Blue Eyes” is a funny, funny 8. This engaging romantic comedy is perfectly timed for late summer laughs.
