Word: ninas
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...playwright, obviously does. She's been trying to get an adaptation of Stephen McCauley's novel The Object of My Affection off the ground for something like a decade. It offers a gay guy named George (Paul Rudd) getting jilted, taking a room with a straight woman named Nina (Jennifer Aniston) and having them fall into, yes, affection. On her part, though, that develops into something a little more intense, especially when she contrasts his sweetness to the abrasiveness of her straight lover, Vince (John Pankow). Those feelings grow when she discovers that she's pregnant and that George...
...muddle, especially since Wasserstein provides the couple with all kinds of complications. She has rich, interfering relatives (Alan Alda and the divinely bitchy Allison Janney). He soon has a new gay flame (Amo Gulinello) whose worldly-wise longtime companion (wonderfully portrayed by Nigel Hawthorne) gets hurt as hard as Nina does. But it's also too much of a muddle. There is no logical way to arrange the kind of romantic reconciliation the writer, director (Nicholas Hytner) and we desperately want to enjoy. For neither Wasserstein nor Rudd quite wants to come to grips with the fact that George, despite...
...script is schizophrenic. While Macaulay's book is known for its intensive character studies of Nina and George, Wendy Wasserstein's script idles with the addition of random, irrelevant characters. Alan Alda and Allison Janey appear in small supporting roles to fit the screen with comic relief whenever the cheese becomes unbearable. Nigel Hawthorne, a Hytner mainstay, is thrown into the movie for no apparent reason (other than to give a tedious monologue where he works in the title of the movie.) Even worse, the script is unsure of itself-the declarations of love between various sets of characters...
Though her character on "Friends" and her role in Picture Perfect have made Jennifer Aniston a symbol of exasperating whininess, she delivers an impressively nuanced performance as Nina. For once, she refrains from flustered annoyance and genuinely portrays a sympathetic character who must balance pragmatism with her own sexual frustrations...
From the outset, Nina knows she's going to lose the battle to win George's love. Aniston makes us understand why she keeps fighting the self-defeating...