Movie Review: In Her Eyes

Anyone who’s taking the “Art of Film” core will immediately recognize the opening homage in Curtis Hanson’s “In Her Shoes,” as the camera cuts back and forth between parallel scenes of two mobile pairs of shoes cleverly establishing the personalities of their owners. It’s an allusion to the preface of Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” (and no accident either—Hanson’s 1990 film “Bad Influence” drew heavily from the film), and a bit of bravado direction that sharply highlights the movie’s central metaphor.

Shoes are transformative and their importance has always been reflected in our cultural products. Think Dorothy’s red shoes, Cinderella’s slippers, Carrie Bradshaw’s shoe fetish.

In “Shoes,” two sisters, Maggie and Rose Feller, share nothing in common but shoes, both in their mutual passion for footwear and in their size 8-1/2 feet. Rose (Toni Collette) is a Princeton-educated attorney, short and kind of frumpy. Maggie (Cameron Diaz) is her party-animal kid sister, embarrassingly idiotic yet able to seduce any man she targets. Maggie bums off of Rose’s couch and they establish a somewhat reciprocal, primarily parasitical, relationship, in which Maggie updates Rose on the latest fashions (“1994 called—it wants its scrunchie back”) in return for unauthorized loans from Maggie’s vast shoe collection.

Rose’s thinning patience for her sister finally snaps when one day, Maggie has sex with Rose’s lover, which Rose discovers, precipitating an angry fight. Maggie packs her trash bag of designer clothes and moves in with their grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) in Florida, who we discover has been living in a retirement center, though thought dead by the sisters for many years. The sisters’ icy feud forces them to develop independently, enabling each to learn more about themselves.

As implausible as the plot may occasionally seem, the director manages to suspend our disbelief through the charisma of the flamboyant Maggie and the more somber Rose. Collette masterfully brings Rose’s internal transformation to the surface—in her struggle to open up emotionally, she reveals herself to the audience, with brighter smiles, a more confident gait, and a simple abandonment of camera-consciousness. The result is a maturely developed character, deserving of our empathy (who doesn’t relate to bouts of ice cream-filled self-deprecation?).

Maggie also changes, though her shift is less convincing. She receives, as if from the screenwriting gods, a latent analytic mastery of poetry, but she remains the carefree and floozy younger sister; her mischievous glances towards Rose’s fiancé leave us skeptical of how much she has actually learned by film’s end. Diaz nonetheless has fun in her typecast role as the blonde bombshell, and we have fun with her as she exposes her grandmother’s friends to “Sex and the City” and bungles a dog-washing job.

Though overlong and somewhat predictable, the film manages to combine feel-good sentiments with funny remedies for low self-esteem. Rose may not feel comfortable in a thong, but sexual confidence abounds the minute she steps into her black stilettos, reminding every person who’s ever gained the “Freshman 15” or felt irredeemably unattractive, that everyone has something to flaunt.