Confessions of a Shopaholic

Say what you want about Jerry Bruckheimer, but he seems to have his finger on the pulse of American tastes. Confessions of a Shopaholic, which I saw up in Tyngsboro last Friday, is a perfectly timed movie.

Ilsa Fisher plays a young woman in Manhattan who is a journalist for a gardening magazine. Her real passion is fashion, as well as shopping for designer clothes. She dreams of being a writer for a fashion magazine.

In American romantic comedies, bad luck is actually disguised opportunity, often in the form of Cupid playing matchmaker. Moreover, movies reward spunk in their protagonists. If you take a courageous risk, you will be rewarded, even if it takes time. Put these two principles together, and you get one of the canons of Hollywood poetics: when you lose your job, you should take a daring risk to do something you really want to do, and you will wind up being the better for it. Often you need the advice of a friend in order to push you in the right direction.

Thus you get the premise for Confessions. The young woman loses her job, but through brashness, she lands a better one at a magazine that is part of the same publishing conglomerate as the fashion book she so dearly wants to write for. Her plan is to bide her time and to work her way up to her desired publication.

Her new job is at a financial magazine, something she knows nothing about. Since she landed the job on false pretenses, the movie places her in the position of the "pretender." The plot arc of the movie must follow as thus: her naivete and ignorance must actually turn out to be assets in the sense that her "fresh take" on financial matters will impress and amaze her big boss. Despite many close scrapes with being exposed, she actually adjusts to her outrageous situation and earns the respect and admiration of her peers.

Since this is a romantic comedy, her brashness also lands her in the company of the man who will become the love of her life (Luke Brandon). He must be impressed with her even more than anyone else, and thus he is also the one most deceived by her.

It turns out that her love interest, the editor of her magazine, is independently wealthy. According to classical dictates, however, she must remain unaware of this until she has fallen for him. In the old-school formula, love could never be about money. In this case, the movie follows the classical prescription perfectly.

Eventually, however, she must suffer a downfall. Movies must punish deceit of this kind, especially in matters of the heart. The protagonist will realize this at some point, and must attempt to "come clean." There must be a scene in which she resolves to privately tell the truth about her deception to her boss and love interest.

What must happen? Before she can open her mouth, the deceived party must interject something that will make it excruciatingly hard and painful to reveal the truth. At the last minute, the stakes will be upped, and she must back down from her resolution, and continue with the deceit.

Eventually, when the whole house of cards comes down, this missed opportunity will haunt her, and cause her much more pain than she would have otherwise incurred, had she come clean and told the truth in private. Instead she will not only lose the trust of the deceived party, but she will be publicly exposed and humiliated, completely discredited in a way that leaves her seemingly worse off than she was at her lowest point before she landed the job.

But true love must conquer all. The protagonist having debased herself, the story now shifts to the formerly deceived male love interest. The ball is in his court, according to the narrative. The crucial moment arrives when, in the company of his superiors, he has a chance to advance his career by forsaking her, and renouncing his belief in her.

For the hero to be worthy of her love, he must remain steadfast under this test, and he does. The most potent thing for a classical movie hero to do, romantically speaking, is publicly defend the honor of the woman he loves when she is under attack, even at the expense of his own welfare and reputation. After this point, their romance is sealed.

The resurrection of the heroine must be predicated on her confession (as per the title) of the character flaw (sin) that led her to create the deception in the first place, namely her addiction to shopping. When she is able to do this, not only is the romance possible, but she can now re-ascend in her career path, and resume the status she once achieved through pluck, gumption, and beginner's luck. Everything now is honest and above-board.

Given all this classical formula, whether or not the movie is successful as a narrative depends on the minute craftsmanship in the story so as to make the characters fresh, topical, and interesting. There are an infinite number of variations on the old plots, and the trick is to come up with a way that speaks to the audience of the present day.

In that respect, I have nothing against Confessions of a Shopaholic. As a romantic "pretender" comedy, it did pretty much everything you could ask for it. It was fun to watch and went by quickly. The worst I can say against it is that in order to bring down the protagonist, it relied on sabotage, which is one of those "story crutches" that weakens a plot.

But you have to cut corners somewhere, and the sabotage here was set up well and was believable in the context of the characters presented. So it is only minor quibbling to bring this up.

Something 2009-ish about this movie that stuck out to me was that its release seems to solidify the existence of a subgenre, namely the "Label movie," which is about the obsession among certain women to purchase and wear clothes from certain manufacturers and designers. We've seen this plenty in Sex and the City, as well as in such movies as The Devil Wears Prada and the remake of The Women. Confessions of a Shopaholic may signify the apogee of this subgenre, just as the nation comes to grips with its own consumerism.

Like I said, Bruckheimer has the touch.