’Rumor Has It’ is a pretty good film. It is not a brilliant film from Rob Reiner but as a pleasant diversion on a weekend afternoon, or possibly as a date movie (for those who still go on dates). Jennifer Aniston, (of ’Friends’), a New Yorker, returning home to L.A. (actually, Pasadena, which becomes a running joke) with her as-yet-unannounced fiancé to attend her younger sister’s wedding. We learn all of this in the first few minutes.
Rumour has it that there was a family in Pasadena that the film ’The Graduate’ is based upon - Sarah (Aniston) fixates upon the idea that this may be her family. She questions her grandmother (Shirley MacLaine, but don’t call her grandmother), who tells of a possible affair her mother had with a playboy before her marriage (Kevin Costner, now a dot-com mega-millionaire). Sarah goes off without her fiancé in search of her mother’s past, but finds a kind of ’past’ of her own.
Lots of twists and turns in the film have the characters racing up and down the coast of California in search of the past, the future, and the truth, which ends up being both expected and unexpected in this complicated but easily-followed plot.
This situational comedy can only be a comfortable television show, even with the star power of MacLaine and Costner backing Aniston up. The writing is functional with occasional flashes of humour, and the pace of the film is pleasant. In all, this is a good film, worth seeing for a bit of entertainment.