Seven Oaks Magazine.

There are a thousand and one surprises which may befall a young publication such as ours, disrupting the best-laid plans of an eager editorial staff or a determined writer. The original thrust behind this piece - the reason for calling in a favour to get a last-minute ride to the cinema, the reason for shelling out ten hard-borrowed dollars for a matinee showing - was very simply to pen the most up-to-the-minute possible manifestation of a piece which I could otherwise have written at any point in the years since I've seen Clerks : "Why I Hate Kevin Smith," by Charles Demers. There was a cruel look of gleeful sadism on my face as I made my way into Jersey Girl , anticipating fish in a barrel; not only was it Kevin Smith, I thought, but a reunification of the stars of the war-crime-disguised-as-movie, Gigli , Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. As the credits rolled, gearing me up to unleash everything I had onto Smith and Bennifer, I learned that Jason Biggs - I mean Jason Biggs! The man couldn't even succeed in a Woody Allen film! - would also be appearing. The film, as far as I could tell, was a goner.

One hundred and ten minutes later, as I stepped out of the theatre with the dried salt of tears ringing my disbelieving eyes, as I surrendered to the fact that I would have to admit that Smith had won this round, I looked up into the sky and saw, in Vancouver's typically overcast skies, a rainbow. I saw a fucking rainbow.

Smith is a writer-director whom I have typically lumped in with a generation of filmmakers who read only the first two chapters of their assignment on existentialism, leaving them mired in a cynicism which pretends to irony at its best, and dabbles in a puerile nihilism at its worst. Moreover, Smith didn't even make films very well. Movies like his Mallrats or Chasing Amy were nothing more than celluloid versions of the same suburban narcissism which has launched a thousand whining garage bands and awful spoken word poets: "Look at me! I have no story, no charisma, just a camera/guitar/affected cadence!"

Jersey Girl was, for me at least, a welcome departure from Smith's usual Gen-X fare, showcasing a filmmaker who has matured to the point where not only is he willing to abandon (at least temporarily) his once-ubiquitous Jay and Silent Bob characters, but willing to put out and explore emotion, affection, and sweetness unmediated by smirking irony or sarcasm.

The film, touchingly dedicated to Smith's late father, is an exploration of fatherhood, revolving primarily around the relationship between a widower named Ollie (Ben Affleck) and his daughter Gertrude (an adorable and talented Raquel Castro). The picture begins in the glitzy New York of the 1990s. Having lost his wife (Jennifer Lopez) to an aneurism during childbirth and subsequently losing his job as a publicist due to an inability to predict the superstardom of Will Smith, Ollie is forced to move with his infant daughter from glitzy New York to working class New Jersey, where his halfway cantankerous, halfway sensitive street-sweeper father (George Carlin) offers a place to live as well as much unsolicited advice. We pick up seven years later, with Ollie still negotiating fatherhood, and examining the prospects of his return to professional glamour and possible romance with a gorgeous grad student/video clerk named Mya (Liv Tyler).

By no means a perfect, or even great, film - loose ends and cheesiness still crop up from time to time -, Jersey Girl is a profoundly touching picture which explores real emotions and pulls heartstrings without resorting to manipulation. Although my own personal history has left me helplessly at the whim of stories centered around lost mothers and widower fathers, I would venture that I'm not the only person surprised to find themself crying in a movie made by the dude who did Dogma . None of this to suggest that Smith has totally abandoned his caustic wit or propensity for the offensive - an ominous, winking reference to the attack on the World Trade Center is found in Ollie's assertion to his daughter that the musical Cats was "the second worst thing to happen to New York"; Ollie and Mya meet when he mistakenly tries to rent a bisexual porn film as his daughter peruses the children's section. But Smith is unapologetic in granting prominence to issues of sometimes-schmaltzy, mostly-adorable familial love and devotion.

Jersey Girl is a film which will likely have the same effect on Kevin Smith as Cable Guy had for Jim Carrey: A lot of old fans will likely be alienated, while a new crop of viewers will be wholly taken aback by their discovery of talents and abilities which they never suspected were there. I, for one, am not ashamed to admit that I profoundly enjoyed and was touched by this picture. And if you knew just how badly I had wanted to hate it, you'd know what a big deal that was.