As light and breezy as a blow set

LIAM LACEY  The Globe and Mail

Friday, March 9, 2001

Directed by Paddy Breathnach
Written by Simon Beaufoy
Starring Alan Rickman and Nathasha Richardson
Classification: AA
Rating: **

Set in Yorkshire, Blow Dry is yet another British comedy about downtrodden eccentrics with quaint regional accents who get their one shot at glory.

From The Full Monty to Billy Elliot (through Saving Grace, Brassed Off, Waking Ned Divine) and on and on, variations on the story keep getting recycled. In this case, the script was written by Simon Beaufoy who penned The Full Monty. Here he offers a similar mixture of grim truths and homey fantasy.

In Blow Dry, the subject is competitive hairstyling, with the national championships falling, by chance, in the town of Keighly. Directed by Ireland's Paddy Breathnach (I Went Down), it's a hybrid that wavers between a Best in Show-style comedy and a mawkish family drama of betrayal and terminal illness.

The cast includes talented English performers (Natasha Richardson, Alan Rickman) and one American heartthrob pretending to be English (Josh Hartnett).

Richardson plays a hairdresser named Shelley, who is the estranged wife of a barber named Phil (Rickman), and the mother of an adult son (Hartnett). Ten years ago, she dumped husband and kid to take up with a woman (Rachel Griffiths), leaving Phil, once a champion stylist, stewing in his Scotch and bitterness while running his humble barber shop.

Now Shelley discovers she has terminal cancer and wants to mend some long broken fences. "It's not about hair," she says, in a moment where the script reveals a particularly garish example of excessive highlighting. "It's about family."

Rickman manages to provide a few unexpected moments of gold as the grumpy barber. He finds the gruff affection in the northern dialect and keeps his sardonic intelligence under wraps. In a pattern he established with Robin Hood Prince of Thieves and repeated often since, his performance is far more interesting than the movie itself.

Article copyright of The Globe and Mail