Sabrina is is a rom-com-ish kind of thing, and a remake of a 1954 Bogart/Hepburn movie (based on a play by Samuel Taylor), starring Julie Ormond, Harrison Ford, Greg Kinnear, Nancy Marchand, John Wood, Lauren Holly, and Dana Ivey.
Our title character and POV, Sabrina Fairchild (Ormond) is the daughter of a chaffeur (Wood) who works for an immensely rich family, the Larrabees. Sabrina has been in love with David Larrabee (Kinnear) since she was a kid, and watches him womanize at the family's lavish parties. David, for his part, isn't a total slimeball, he just falls in and out of love too quickly. His older brother Linus (Ford), however, is the brains and workhorse of the company, and is known to be heartless.
Sabrina leaves home and lives in Paris for a year, and then returns with some confidence and a haircut and catches David's eye. That's actually a problem, as David is now engaged to Elizabeth Tyson (Holly), whose parents own another huge tech company. Linus sees dollar signs, but then David starts falling for Sabrina, so Linus stabs David in the butt with a champagne flute (well, tricks him into stabbing himself) and romances Sabrina to keep her away long enough for David to forget her. This backfires when Linus discovers he really does have feelings for Sabrina.
It's a cute movie, there's some good, dry, funny dialog, and with a couple of exceptions, the movie takes enough time with even the minor characters that we get a sense of who everyone is and how they fit together. The script has its work cut out for it - Linus is notably older than Sabrina and so having him romance her without coming off as a creep is hard, but the movie gets around that by having him be largely uncomfortable and seemingly aware of that hurdle (plus, as I think about it, he never pursues her in an overtly sexual sense). Likewise, David has to be able to fall for Liz, fall away from Liz, fall for Sabrina, and fall back to Liz but still be likeable, which is a hard ask (fortunately it was 1995 and Greg Kinnear was up to that challenge).
About the only complaint I have is that towards the end of the movie, Sabrina's father proposes to another of the staff (Elizabeth Franz), and it's out of nowhere. They have a couple of scenes together, and there's obvious care in their relationship, but it still feels jarring. That's a pretty minor issue in the scheme of things, though. It's a rom-com that takes time to establish relationships, including showing us Sabrina as she matures and comes into her own, which avoids some of the issues that such movies can have where the women have no other characteristics than "woman who fixes man". Sabrina does fix Linus, but this is actually called out as part of their arc, and he's the one who recognizes that he needs to change something.
Anyway, it'd be interesting to see the original, although I understand that makes a lot more of the "OMG the chaffeur's daughter?!" thing, which I think would just annoy me.
My Grade: B
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: The Saint
No comments:
Post a Comment