So why is Alice crying? Mostly to try to jump-start a movie that, formulaic step by step, needs to confirm that a single woman can be happy. She’s busy building a new career as an interior decorator, and has moved with her two daughters into her childhood home, which she has redecorated to look like something out of a lower-budget Nancy Meyers movie. Alice doesn’t seem too bent out of shape by the separation. Yes, she is newly separated from her music-industry husband (Michael Sheen), who likes to take calls from his New York office with its sweeping view. The problems begin with the script, or perhaps just with the insulting idea that Alice would be crying buckets into a mirror because she’s turning 40 on the day the story opens. “Home Again,” on the other hand, is wholly resistible, partly because it can’t fulfill the promise of that aspirational fantasy either on a craft level or in terms of its emotional and psychological portraiture. Her life is as fluffed as a throw pillow and so drained of realism it is best described as a lifestyle, which can make for a killer aspirational fantasy, at least in Nancy Meyers’s hands. She’s what the brand-conscious call a creative, and while she works (a bit), she spends much of her time on man troubles. To wit: A star (Reese Witherspoon) plays a would-be charmer (here called Alice) whose neuroses are as fabulously customized as her kitchen. Meyers’s movies, the resemblance between influence and imitation will be readily apparent. For her directorial debut, “Home Again,” Hallie Meyers-Shyer, Nancy Meyers’s daughter, has made a shabby copy of a Nancy Meyers romantic comedy.
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