Rating: October 5, 2007 -- THE Good Night is at heart a mediocre Sundance varia tion on the Dudley Moore-Bo Derek alleged classic 10. Jake Paltrow, a veteran TV director making his feature debut, doesn t have a whole lot of fun with this half-baked fantasy. Martin Freeman, the star of A Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy and the BBC version of The Office, plays Gary, a once-famous and modestly gifted pop musician.
Gary is reduced to composing commercial ditties in Manhattan, where he lives all too chastely with his girlfriend Dora (Gwyneth Paltrow, the director s sister, here a mousy brunette), a depressed shrew. Our frustrated hero finds escape in his dreams, where he meets the beautiful fantasy woman Anna (Penelope Cruz), who is interested in nonstop sex. Even better from Gary s perspective, she doesn t constantly whine like Dora.
In fact, she barely speaks at all (not all together a bad strategy for Cruz, whose fortй has never been delivering lines in English). When the exasperated Dora leaves the country, Gary enlists the help of a self-proclaimed dream expert (Danny DeVito, the only appealing character in the piece) to track down Anna. She turns out to be a real-life advertising model named Melodia.
Not surprisingly, the demanding Melodia is a lot less appealing to Gary than Anna was - so much so that, in the film s biggest stretch, he reconsiders his relationship with Dora. Simon Pegg ( Shaun of the Dead ), as Gary s obnoxious more successful former partner and friend, and DeVito lend some energy to this lethargic comedy, which was largely filmed in England, its Manhattan setting notwithstanding. The Good Night is the sort of movie you forget even as you re watching it.
Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (profanity, sex). At the Lincoln Plaza and the Angelika.
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