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What’s the Story?

Reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs

RUMOR HAS IT... follows the romantic travails of writer Sarah Huttinger (Jennifer Aniston). Feeling like she doesn't "fit," she thinks her family is the source for The Graduate, she seeks the man who slept with her mother and grandmother, imagining he might be her father. The occasion for her search is her sister Annie's (Mena Suvari) wedding, for which Sarah and her fiancé Jeff (Mark Ruffalo) fly from New York to Pasadena. Sarah finds the model for Benjamin Braddock, Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner). Now an internet millionaire, he assures her that he can't be her dad (as he suffered "blunt testicular trauma" during a soccer game 39 years ago), and they promptly get drunk and sleep together. Proclaiming that he's enchanted by his single "pretty spectacular" night with Sarah – Beau pursues her to Pasadena.

Is It Any Good?

1

Rumor Has It... is awkward and unfunny. While Sarah's grandmother, the chain-smoking, haughty Katherine Richelieu (Shirley MacLaine), offers comic moments, the movie pretty much abandons her once Sarah finds the model for Benjamin Braddock. Never thinking just to ask her father, Earl (Richard Jenkins), about her dead mother's past, Sarah instead imagines her mom was happiest with this other man, as they spent a weekend in Mexico just before her marriage to Earl.

The film perks up briefly when Beau heads to Pasadena, where he encounters Katherine. Unimaginatively accompanied by Ennio Morricone's spaghetti Western theme, she stalks out to confront her erstwhile lover, and then, pfft. The film retreats from this sparky relationship, so full of raw resentment and regrets, to refocus on the terminally dull Sarah.

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