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Movie Review: Paris Can Wait

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- It's difficult to hear the title of this stubbornly slow-moving movie, Paris Can Wait, without thinking, "But can we?"

Director Eleanor Coppola certainly showcases the charm and appeal of leading lady Diane Lane, but she doesn't flesh out the narrative enough to keep us engaged instead of impatient.

It's a romantic dramedy – of sorts – about Anne, played by Lane, who is an empty nester and has long been married to a successful but severely distracted movie-producer husband, Michael, played in the early moments of the film by Alec Baldwin.

When Anne's husband must leave Cannes, where they are staying during the film festival, intending to reunite with her in Paris, she complains of an ear infection and opts to travel by car instead of flying.

So she accepts an offer from a business colleague of her husband's, Jacques, played by French actor Arnaud Viard, whose flirtatious and gregarious ways have Michael feeling twinges of jealousy.

But as they travel from Cannes and Provence to Lyon to the City of Lights, what should be a seven-hour drive through the French countryside takes a few days, with Jacques wanting to stop at restaurant after restaurant, sightseeing attraction after sightseeing attraction, inn after inn, diversion after diversion.

This frustrates Anne, but it also charms her.

Is Jacques by any chance up to something?  If he were, Michael wouldn't be at all surprised.

The endless scrumptious-looking food and wine make us hungry and thirsty as well and give hobbyist photographer Anne subject after subject to capture visually. But everything seems drawn out.

In truth, a little of this goes a very long way, but writer-producer-director Coppola – maker of the fine documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, about her husband, Francis Coppola – misjudges the allure of the material, except perhaps for the most enthusiastic and forgiving of Francophiles, and lets the film become almost infuriatingly mundane.

The film's chief pleasure is the graceful, endearing, and expressive lead, Diane Lane, the 2002 Oscar nominee for Best Actress for Unfaithful. She responds to the focus on her and thrives during the parade of telling closeups.

But she sure could use a little help. And the travelogue-like piece could use a surprise or two along the way.

As for the "smell the roses" theme, by the time they get to Paris, you won't care if you never smell another.

So we'll drive through 2 stars out of 4. Paris Can Wait is so light and leisurely, you can't wait for it to end.

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