January 23, 2004 | There’s something at once eerily retro and exuberantly campy about Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! A giggly throwback to teen-skewing romantic comedies of 30 or 40 years ago, the movie buzzes with conflicting signals of sweetness and self-parody as it playfully spins a plot at least partly inspired by – no kidding! – Bye Bye Birdie .
Much like the aforementioned musical, Tad Hamilton brings a superstar celebrity to an unpretentious small town where he can interact with an adoring fan. In this case, however, the title character is a jaded movie star, not a drafted rock ‘n’ roller. And the adoring fan turns out to be the most commonsensible character on screen.
Tad Hamilton (Josh Duhamel of TV’s Las Vegas ) is a hunky dreamboat whose Mr. Nice Guy image is temporarily besmirched by tabloid-fueled scandal. Director Robert Luketic ( Legally Blonde ) and screenwriter Victor Levin have some rather quaint notions about what actually constitutes a scandal these days – Tad is photographed while smoking a cigarette and driving very fast while the babe seated beside him swigs a presumably alcoholic beverage – but never mind. The bad publicity requires extreme counter-measures, so Tad’s fey managers (Nathan Lane and Sean Hayes in ultra-mincing mode) arrange for their client to be first prize in a charity-benefit “win a date” contest.
And the winner is: Rosalee Futch (Kate Bosworth), a radiantly chipper cutie-pie who toils as a Piggly Wiggly cashier in Fraziers Bottom, West Virginia. Much to the delight of Cathy (Ginnifer Goodwin), her equally starstruck best friend, and very much to the dismay of Pete (Topher Grace), a smart-alecky store manager who’s none-too-secretly sweet on her, Rosalee is flown to a whimsically caricatured Los Angeles for a dinner date with her idol. Tad makes some smooth moves, which she politely rebuffs in a manner that makes her seem – to Tad, at least – all the more irresistible.
Impulsively drawn to her unaffected “real word” charm, Tad follows her back to Fraziers Gulch, fully intending to maintain a “platonic friendship” while Rosalee helps him rethink his priorities. Naturally, the friendship quickly warms into something else. Just as naturally, Pete is hopelessly, helplessly jealous.
By turns coy and calculated, and very often a little bit of both, Tad Hamilton plays by the Old Hollywood rules restricting on-screen courtship – Tad and Rosalee are repeatedly interrupted before they can consummate their relationship – even as it overplays the gay subtext that often percolated beneath the surface of ’50s and ’60s movies with Doris Day, Rock Hudson and the ineffably flighty Tony Randall. In addition to the mincing managers played by Lane and Hayes, there’s a hotel manager who’s all too eager to provide massage service for Ted.
The movie often is engaging and amusing, despite its overall air of wink-wink, nudge-nudge self-consciousness, but all three leads have a distracting tendency to remind you of other people. Topher Grace looks and sounds like he’s channeling Robert Downey Jr., Kate Bosworth suggests a younger and more level-headed Daryl Hannah, and Josh Duhamel comes across as a hybrid of Brendan Fraser and Greg Kinnear. By now, audiences should be accustomed to movies obviously inspired by other movies. But it’s still somewhat startling to encounter a film in which the lead roles appear to be played by stand-ins.
