Cast: Sandra Bullock, Thomas, Haden Church, Bradley Cooper; Director: Phil Traill; Producers: Sandra Bullock, Mary Mclaglen; Screenwriter: Kim Barker; Music: Christophe Beck; Editor: Rod Dean, Virginia Katz; Genre: Comedy; Cinematography: Tim Suhrstedt; Distributor: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation; Location: California, USA; Running Time: 100 mins;Technical Assessment: 2.5
Moral Assessment: 2.5
CINEMA Rating: For viewers 14 and above
Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock) is a “cruciverbalist”, one who constructs crossword puzzles for a living, an occupation so consuming for her that she neglects every other aspect of her life. Fortyish, she has no social life, much less a boyfriend—and it’s a cause for concern for her parents who eventually set her up on a blind date. The guy, Steve (Bradley Cooper) turns out to be a charming television cameraman for a cable news network. The hyperactive, hyper-articulate Mary programs herself to hook Steve, showing cleavage and climbing all over him in the car—even before they could motor off the driveway. Steve’s phone rings—it’s an urgent call, the kind TV crews get when something newsworthy erupts, and it means Steve must run off, now, to cover a picket outside a hospital over a remedial surgery of a three-legged infant. Torn between lust and relief, he tries to be nice and tells Mary it would have been more fun if he could take her along. Man-hungry and gullible, Mary swallows the white lie and starts dogging Steve wherever his work takes him. He dreads seeing her stalking him from one news site to the next, but she hardly knows she’s making a fool of herself, being egged on by Steve’s colleague, the TV reporter Hartman Hughes (Thomas Hayden Church), who plays the practical joke to get even with Steve.
Sandra Bullock’s agent must be properly guided—or fired. Choosing a role that projects Bullock as a virtual member of the Three Stooges is sealing her fate as a serious actress. Maybe the problem is with Mary the character, or with director Phil Traill’s handling of character and actress. We give the benefit of the doubt to Trailler’s intention to celebrate Mary’s supposedly delightful eccentricity and encourage the audience to be emotionally sensitive to such a person, but the resultant picture of the bungling, sex-starved Mary is more grating than funny. Other actors could act silly and still be funny, like Mr. Bean, but to say that the overacting Bullock here could be Mrs. Bean would be a great insult to Mr. Bean. If Bullock wants to redeem herself in moviedom, her next role should bring to the fore her innate gifts as an actor—that is, if she’s getting any next offer at all.
All About Steve takes digs at media that the viewer ought to consider more seriously. What kind of news do media go crazy about? Controversies over “freaks of nature” like three-legged babies? Unfortunate accidents like that with deaf children falling into a well? Why use deaf children? The character Mary here is a caricature that stereotypes women—it implies that brains automatically exclude common sense. As her work with crossword puzzles shows, Mary knows many more words than the average person but she cannot utilize this knowledge to guide her actions. There is an attempt at a win-win situation in the end, but it comes too late. Whatever traces of sympathy, whatever hope for transformation the audience might have had for Mary earlier, is overpowered by the annoying stupidity she has displayed all that time.
