Fed up with moving from state to state, a young George Hamilton(played by Logan Lerman) decides that enough is enough, and chooses St. Louis over the open road. Unless his mother can prove her love by answering a few basic questions about himself, George will choose substance over style, the rural life over a metropolitan one. Anne Deveraux(Renee Zelwegger), an aging southern belle, who from the outset of "My One and Only", fails at motherhood(by early-fifties pre-feminist standards), and once again, proves her ignorance of the societal rules which dictate that a mother find her children endlessly fascinating. When put on the spot, she can neither name George's favorite color nor his favorite book. True to his word, while Anne and her other son, George's half-brother Robbie(Mark Rendall) are by then long-gone(having resumed their cross-country trip in a baby-blue Cadillac), George sits down for an old-fashioned midwestern dinner with his midwestern sponsors(Anne's sister Rose and her husband), looking fixedly at a midwestern life ahead of him. His mother, an ex-wife of a womanizing bandleader(played by Kevin Bacon), might not have been the ideal parent for most children, but he was the ideal parent for George(this wisdom would come much later in life), an aspiring novelist, who unknowingly endorses his alternative childhood during an oral report on what he did during the summer(by now he's in New York).
Television codifies us, and in the early-fifties, mothers like Dorothy Malone and Donna Reed ruled the airwaves, mother who stayed at home and tended to their husband and children. Instead of marrying an insurance salesman: a dependable man, a punch-the-clock man, she married a bandleader, a hepcat whom she could paint the town red with. Twice a divorcée, Anne is back in the game; a little bit older, but nevertheless beautiful, as her search for a husband takes the mother of two from one screwball comedy situation to another. Bearing a passing resemblance to Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels"(the 1942 comedy classic which told the story of a Hollywood film director who tries to pass himself off as poor for veracity's sake after announcing his plans to mount an adaptation of "Oh, Brother Where Art Thou"), this impeccable period piece flips around the economical circumstances surrounding the protagonist(the fancy car gives people the impression that they're fabulously rich), in which the masquerade enables the artist(in this case, a writer) to record his first-hand experiences(for the ongoing story which would become an autobiography, and then this film) with a slant, created by the illusion of wealth that people gleam from Anne's glamorous persona and image-making car. As George recounts the story of his summer vacation, the moviegoer notes how the presentation of the details(in the genre's signature rat-a-tat delivery of words) have all the makings of a classic screwball comedy. As a collection of anecdotal moments as related by George to his classmates, Anne's travels, a Homer-like epic in which she gets picked up for prostitution in Pittsburgh, and almost marries a bigamist in St. Louis, doesn't suggest the dramatic reading of these seemingly absurd situations that the moviegoer witnesses in "My One and Only". To render Anne's disappointments in the language of screwball would demean her. The film serves as a correction to George's original presentation of these childhood vignettes, a time when the hasty chronicling of his mother's trials and tribulations were too contemporary for thoughtful evaluation. Removed from his adolescent anger, Anne's setbacks are presented as no laughing matter. Like all children who grow up and realize that their parents did the best they could, George Deveraux, otherwise known as George Hamilton, the guy with the tan, is also the guy who loved his mother, and in "My One and Only", the moviegoer can see how a generous spirit is the deciding factor that separates comedy from drama.
Television codifies us, and in the early-fifties, mothers like Dorothy Malone and Donna Reed ruled the airwaves, mother who stayed at home and tended to their husband and children. Instead of marrying an insurance salesman: a dependable man, a punch-the-clock man, she married a bandleader, a hepcat whom she could paint the town red with. Twice a divorcée, Anne is back in the game; a little bit older, but nevertheless beautiful, as her search for a husband takes the mother of two from one screwball comedy situation to another. Bearing a passing resemblance to Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels"(the 1942 comedy classic which told the story of a Hollywood film director who tries to pass himself off as poor for veracity's sake after announcing his plans to mount an adaptation of "Oh, Brother Where Art Thou"), this impeccable period piece flips around the economical circumstances surrounding the protagonist(the fancy car gives people the impression that they're fabulously rich), in which the masquerade enables the artist(in this case, a writer) to record his first-hand experiences(for the ongoing story which would become an autobiography, and then this film) with a slant, created by the illusion of wealth that people gleam from Anne's glamorous persona and image-making car. As George recounts the story of his summer vacation, the moviegoer notes how the presentation of the details(in the genre's signature rat-a-tat delivery of words) have all the makings of a classic screwball comedy. As a collection of anecdotal moments as related by George to his classmates, Anne's travels, a Homer-like epic in which she gets picked up for prostitution in Pittsburgh, and almost marries a bigamist in St. Louis, doesn't suggest the dramatic reading of these seemingly absurd situations that the moviegoer witnesses in "My One and Only". To render Anne's disappointments in the language of screwball would demean her. The film serves as a correction to George's original presentation of these childhood vignettes, a time when the hasty chronicling of his mother's trials and tribulations were too contemporary for thoughtful evaluation. Removed from his adolescent anger, Anne's setbacks are presented as no laughing matter. Like all children who grow up and realize that their parents did the best they could, George Deveraux, otherwise known as George Hamilton, the guy with the tan, is also the guy who loved his mother, and in "My One and Only", the moviegoer can see how a generous spirit is the deciding factor that separates comedy from drama.