Le Divorce

In a team-up as revered as those of Superman and Batman or Government and Big Business, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory join forces yet again to produce middle-brow-aspiring-to-highbrow drama for the PBS crowd. In this one, Kate Hudson hams it up as The Pretty Girl who goes to France to find amour, but instead finds love. Naomi Watts is excellent (as always) as Hudson’s sister, a woman who is going through the titular divorce. Meanwhile, Hudson is boffing both a hot young French boy and a sexy older French man, who also happens to be her sister’s husband’s uncle, or something like that. There’s lots of "oh, you Americans are so uncultured," "oh, you French are so snobby," sorts of things going on, and there’s also a few laughs and a really bizarre and out of place performance by Matthew "Will Work For Food" Modine. It’s not all bad, but it’s not all good, and it could have been, if an actress with a bit more talent than the incredibly awful but well-connected Miss Hudson had been chosen for the lead.