In her Shoes

Ich liebe Filme. 
Eigentlich gucke ich so jedes Wochenende einen.
Und hier is jetzt so eine Mischung aus Analysis, Inhaltsangabe,
Filmkritik und vllt auch noch ein bisschen Charakterisrung
von mir über einen Film, den ich schon sehr oft geguckt habe.
(Auf Englisch, sorry wenn da fehler drin sind..)
Vielleicht gefällt sie euch ja ;-)

„Grow up! “- That’s what 26-year-old Maggie (Cameron Diaz) is told to do all the time. But justly: She is a typical party-girl, daddy’s darling, the-hate-of-stepmother and not-grown-up little sister of plain-Jane Rose (Toni Colette), successful lawyer and workaholic in Philadelphia.
One day, when Maggie is drunk again and Rose is called to pick her up, her stepmother Cydelle kicks her out and she stays at Roses apartment. With that, Roses life is completely turned upside down. The opposite-sisters are always at the loggerheads until Maggie sleeps with Jim, the man Rose was about to fall in love with. Now Maggie is thrown out there too and flees –full of hope- to her dead-believed grandmother Ella in an old-folks home in Florida.
Ella (Shirley MacLaine) is really surprised and happy to see her granddaughter for the first time after about 20 years, because Maggie’s father Michael told her to stay away from his children after their mother Caroline did suicide.
This is where the movie starts developing. First, it’s all chaotic, but then Maggie really grows up, gets a job and builds up a relationship to Ella while 1000 miles away Rose falls in real love with Simon. Along the way, both of the sisters change in their way.
Ella doesn’t know about the fight between Maggie and Rose, so she invites Rose to her. When the sisters meet again, they’re really surprised to see each other, because they were clueless about each other’s whereabouts. They make up and it ends happily with the marriage between Rose and Simon.

First, Ella is the polite and caring grandmother, but when Maggie shows her “Miss-highty-tighty-in-hot-pants” site, Ella turns to educational, what Maggie’s father missed out.
Actually, she’s a tough cookie, but once, she tells her deepest secret to Mrs. Lefkowitz, an older women Ella uses to spend most of her time with. Officially her daughter had a car accident, but Ella received a letter from Caroline, that came one day after the funeral. It says “Please take care of my girls”, so the accident was on purpose. And that’s another reason why she takes care of Maggie. Slowly, their relationship takes the way to what it’s supposed to be.

But that’s not the only relationship Maggie builds. When she starts to work at the retirement home’s assisted living center, a retired professor wants Maggie to read to him because he’s blind, what’s a problem because Maggie can’t read, so she tries to escape by saying she’s “a slowly reader”. But he responses that he’s “a slowly listener”. While reading, she starts to slip off in thinking how the poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, a poem about “the art of losing”, fits into her situation. By knowing that she can be liked not only by her looking, she discovers, slowly and uncertainly, that she can be responsible and perhaps even respectable.

Workaholic-Rose could never imagine to stop working as a lawyer, but when Maggie disappears, she realized what she really needs and loves in her life, and that's her little sister and best friend. By quitting she takes her first step to being what she always wanted after she found out what she really wants to be or do.

Although there are men involved in the story, the “love” in the movie is basically about friends, about hearts being, or not being, carried in other hearts, as the poem “I Carry Your Heart” Maggie reads out later in the movie transmits.
In fact, the movie shows three women, changing as one starts to change everything.

The movie starts quite ordinary, but, what the viewer doesn’t antipicate, with every scene it gets more emotional and deeper. And that’s what makes the movie to a very special one.