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My Life in Ruins Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sexual content) Genre: Comedy Theater release: June 05, 2009 by Fox Searchlight Directed by: Donald Petrie Runtime: 1 hour 35 minutes Cast: Nia Vardalos (Georgia), Richard Dreyfuss (Irv), Alexis Georgoulis (Poupi), Alistair McGowan (Nico) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

My Life in Ruins comes billed as "from the star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding," but it could just as truthfully be billed as "from the director of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days." Both are romantic comedies from about six years ago, and if Greek Wedding put Nia Vardalos on the map with the same basic schtick she reprises in My Life in Ruins, the new film's randy humor is closer in spirit to director Donald Petrie's How to Lose a Guy than to the tame PG Greek Wedding.

If in the end My Life in Ruins isn't as outright unpleasant as How to Lose a Guy, it falls well short of the simple charm of Greek Wedding. Where Greek Wedding offered a satirical take of old-world family ways as fond and familiar as it was stereotyped, My Life in Ruins offers roundly stereotyped caricatures of just about everybody, but without the fondness or familiarity.

Set in Greece, where Vardalos's character Georgia, an out-of-work Greek-American history professor who has lost her kafe (which seems to be Greek for "mojo"), works at a charter tour agency rather than a travel agency, the movie offers a microcosm of humanity on a tour bus. The movie's running joke, and it's not necessarily a bad one, is that tourists are less interested in seeing historically significant sites and learning about culture and history than they are in eating ice cream and shopping for souvenirs.

Nia Vardalos as Georgia

For Georgia, it is maddening to spend a week trying to enrich and educate tourists who really want to pose for photos with their faces on headless standees of Zeus and Athena and go home with a 50 percent polyester T-shirt with a Trojan horse. "Why," Georgia wonders, "am I spending my time showing gorgeous ruins to tourists who care nothing about them?" The flip side is the heap of "Average" customer ratings in Georgia's file, which may suggest that she's not the most effective history teacher in the world.

In this world, Australians are tipsy beer-drinkers who speak in incomprehensible slang, saying such things as "How many bells you got on the old dickory?" Spanish women are divorced floozies who profess to be "off men" with about as much conviction as a heroin addict declaring this hit his last. Americans are loud, boring boors. Canadians are politely diffident to the point of imbecility. Elderly British women are cheerfully, possibly criminally eccentric. Married couples with teenaged children are miserable. Etc., etc.

In the midst of all this one-dimensionality, Richard Dreyfuss embodies a welcome two dimensions as Irv, a widowed Jewish American who both embodies and subverts the stereotype of the class clown, the jokester who seems to think he's the life of every party. For harried Georgia, Irv is a thorn in her side, until he slowly reveals another side of his own, eventually becoming a sort of godfather figure to the whole tour bus.

As a character, Irv stands so far above the rest of this lot that he seems almost supernatural; there's even a running gag about whether he is actually God, or at least a Greek god. Dreyfuss's humorous, low-key authority is so natural that one can easily imagine the actor playing a similar role on the set.

Unfortunately, Irv is the only character whose stereotype is subverted in any way, or who shows another side. The group bonding that occurs may make the characters fonder of one another, but none of the other tourists brings any additional depth, humanity or wisdom to the table.

Are all tourists really this lame? The movie toys with the idea that Georgia's tours may be sabotaged by her unprincipled coworker Nico (funny Alistair McGowan), who bribes their boss to give him the "good" groups—as well as the first-class accommodations, while Georgia's groups are booked at dives where the elevator is broken and the desk clerk leeringly solicits guests for sex in exchange for postage. (This way, we know that all of Greece isn't as cruddy as what the movie shows us.)

Irv (Richard Dreyfuss) has a word with Georgia

But then it turns out that Nico keeps his tour groups happy by pandering to their yen for ice cream and shopping. Evidently, even "good" tourists aren't really interested in ancient ruins and history.

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