It’s a no-brainer, right? Everygirl’s favourite everygirl, Jennifer Aniston, returns to Pasadena with her dishy lawyer fiancé (Ruffalo) for her sister’s wedding. There, she stumbles upon a sordid piece of family history – that her late mom and wearingly irrepressible grandma (Shirley MacLaine) inspired the book and film of The Graduate. Intrigued, Jen sets off to find the ‘Benjamin Braddock’ of the piece and determine her real paternity. Alas, instead of Dustin Hoffman, we get Kevin Costner, an internet bizillionaire with his own plane and a hotline to Bill Clinton.
Will our girl keep with family tradition and succumb to this cad’s charms? Or is Costner her dad? I guarantee you won’t care less. While Rumour Has It seems to offer all manner of darkly comic, incestuous possibility, it’s hard to imagine how the film could be any duller.
There’s absolutely no narrative drive to speak of, besides placing the heroine in any number of win-win situations and nice frocks.
Sadly, though she can still keep us on side, (oh, that Angelina Jolie…) she has nothing to work with here. And when you find yourself longing for someone to start banging on a glass panel, only to dash in and rescue Kevin Costner from so unlovely a vehicle, you know it’s truly hopeless.