“How To Deal” (New Line Cinema)
Pop songstress Mandy Moore follows up her tragic role in “A Walk To Remember” with a new story of teen love and life titled “How To Deal.” This film puts the life of a teen-age girl under the microscope and comes up with a tale of finding love, losing love, and having faith in love restored.
Halley (Moore) is the teen-age girl who is the focus of the story. She lives with her mother Lydia (Allison Janney) and her sister Ashley (Mary Catherine Garrison). As the film opens her mother and father (Peter Gallagher) are getting a divorce so he can marry his much younger girlfriend. Seeing her parents go through all of this disillusions Halley about love.
Her best friend Scarlett (Alexandra Holden) is her complete opposite. She is madly in love and having a wonderful time. She encourages Halley to date school oddball Macon (Trent Ford). They do start dating but Halley is wary of getting serious.
Later in the movie there is an unplanned pregnancy, an on again off again wedding, and a new affair by one of her parents. These elements and occurrences help the young Halley grow up a bit.
Young teen-age girls should love this movie. It is giggly and silly and in some ways romantic. Moore makes an attractive heroine, but she doesn’t display a large amount of acting talent. Ford is scruffily charming as Macon but he too has limited appeal.
Janney and Gallagher have thankless roles as Halley’s parents, but Nina Foch manages to steal every scene she is in as Halley’s pot smoking grandma. She is too talented to be overcome by the burdensome script.
The movie is rated PG-13 for profanity and drug use.
“How To Deal” will be no big deal to most people. It has a fairly interesting story but no major plot occurrences. The cast does what it can with the script but generally is beaten down by its trite dialogue and inane plot twists. This will lead most people to take one look at this movie and say “deal” me out.
I scored “How To Deal” a trumped 4 out of 10.
