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Actress Bullock takes 'Steve' in stride

'All About Steve' is a physical comedy for Sandra Bullock.

Published online on Friday, Sep. 04, 2009

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I love watching Sandra Bullock walk. Sure, her vocal timing is impeccable, and her expressive face can squeeze out laughs that you didn't even think were possible, and she has an A-list ability to fill a big screen in terms of humanity and relatability. But when it comes to her comedies, her physical choices -- and especially her gait -- are what really crack me up.

That's certainly the case with "All About Steve," a romp about a pathetic crossword-puzzle author who stalks a hunky TV journalist across the country. Bullock unleashes this amiable comedy on the Labor Day weekend audience with a bunny-hop-style silliness that only she could get away with.

It's been a good summer for Bullock's physical comedy. In "The Proposal," she elevated what could have been a moribund romantic comedy into a decent comic experience with her over-the-top portrayal of an ice-queen businesswoman. What I remember most from that film is the way her uptight character attacked the streets of Manhattan with her high heels as if she were a mountain climber pounding a crampon into granite. Then, when her character made it to the wilds of Alaska, her city-slicker legs seemed to buckle beneath her.

In "All About Steve," Bullock plays another of her signature roles: the bumbling, brilliant but socially impaired anti-heroine. As befitting such a klutz, her character ambles along with the kind of dogged determination that a very bad ballet student demonstrates on the first lesson away from the barre. It's like a cross between a third-grader skipping and a bad fashion model on the runway.

Bullock's Mary Horowitz is a doozy of a social misfit: She is a brainiac who can't stop chattering, has a bundle of idiosyncratic tics (she sniffs someone on a first date), lives at home with her parents and has a hamster named Carol who appears to be her best friend. Mary has parlayed her considerable talent and intellect into a less than lucrative career writing crossword puzzles for the local newspaper in Sacramento (and, no, the paper is not named for a stinging insect).

When Mary gets set up by her parents on a blind date with Steve, a TV cameraman (played with charm by Bradley Cooper), things go predictably awry -- with a smitten Mary taking him at his word when he says he wishes she could "follow him across the country" when all he really wants to do is get away from her. The next thing he knows, she hits the road to follow him from one breaking TV news story to another.

It's all very contrived, of course, and director Phil Traill encourages a broad-and-silly style that lends itself well to Bullock's strengths. In any other universe but Hollywood, Mary would be directed toward professional help, but here her oddities and tics count more for comic effect than anything else. Within the cotton-candy world that Bullock and Traill are able to craft, it all seems almost plausible. Well, maybe. If someone hits you on the head first.

Thomas Haden Church has some amusing moments as a devil-may-care network TV reporter who keeps encouraging Mary to chase her man. And the film's social critique of network TV news, while heavy-handed, does offer some salient points for consideration, including: Why the heck do TV reporters do stand-ups in hurricanes?

Mostly, though, "All About Steve" is a mindless, goofy diversion that features Bullock in top comic form. She's walked many miles in those shoes, and by now, she's got every step down.