Picture Perfect (1997 film)

Plot

Kate (Jennifer Aniston) is struggling in the advertising business in New York City: she cannot move forward despite her talent. Her boss, Mr. Mercer (Kevin Dunn), passes her up for a promotion because she is "not stable enough". Her co-worker, Darcy (Illeana Douglas), invents a story claiming Kate is engaged to Nick (Jay Mohr), a freelance videographer who lives in Massachusetts, with whom Kate had her picture taken during a friend's wedding

All seems to work out well for Kate and she got her promotion. After Nick saves a little girl from a fire and winds up in the news, Kate is forced to bring her alleged fiancé to dinner with Mercer and his wife. She asks Nick to "break up" with her. Nick, who already likes Kate, complies to please Kate. Meanwhile, Sam (Kevin Bacon), a colleague that Kate had always wanted, takes notice of her. They have sex twice.

As Kate and Nick get to know each other, she starts to like him. The night of the dinner arrives and Kate and Nick are prepared for their "big fight". But, Nick tries to suppress the "fight" by complimenting her and expressing the desire for a future with Kate. However, Kate just wants the "fight" to happen. At the dinner table, Kate tries to drive Nick into a fight but it doesn't work. She pays a restaurant employee to call her number and tries to make it seem like Nick is having an affair with an ex-girlfriend. At first Nick is a bit lost but figures it out and finally plays along.

After a week, feeling guilty, Kate admits to Mercer (and several co-workers) her cover-up, stating that she was dressing for the job she wanted, repeating a line that Mercer had used on her earlier regarding her instability. Mercer pays a visit to Kate's office, where she tells him she's quitting. Mercer counters by admitting to her how he exaggerated his own past at one point in his life, as well as suggests she take a few days off to go to Massachusetts and patch things up with Nick. Mercer let her keep her job as an ad exec.

Kate walks in while Nick is recording a wedding and he rebuffs her attempts to patch things up until she humiliates herself in front of the soon-to-be-married couple, as Nick did in front of her boss earlier. Satisfied that the playing field has been leveled, he invites her to the wedding reception as his guest. They make up after Kate accepts.

Production

Academy Award winner Tom Fleischman is the re-recording mixer of the film. Picture Perfect also consists of other Academy Award nominees such as Les Lazarowitz, Jane Robinson, and Debra Schutt.

The movie was shot in June and July 1996.

Reception

Picture Perfect received mixed reviews from critics, as it holds a 48% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 42 reviews. Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score from 1 to 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gave the film a 44 based on 16 critics.

Roger Ebert found the film at odds with itself, noting how the script has poor storytelling elements but contains "nice dialogue touches" delivered by the characters, saying that "it's a shame the plot is so contrived, because parts of this [movie] are really pretty good." Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it a "light, undemanding comedy", commending its use of sitcom humor, bits of satire and the performances of Aniston, Douglas and Bacon, concluding that it "bounces busily among these players until it has to slow down and pretend to be sincere." Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle heavily criticized the film for having the aesthetics of "an over-long, over-nice, made-for-TV movie that goes nowhere quick." He gave notice to Aniston's performance lacking sustainability to capture the big screen, and bringing the rest of the main cast to her acting level.

Box office

The film opened at number 5 at the North American box office making $7.8 million in its opening weekend. It eventually earned over $44 million worldwide, making it a moderate success commercially by beating out its $19 million budget.