Who is Julie Andrews?
Is she simply an actress who has had the same expression on her face for 40 years? Or is she the everlasting fairy of niceness, dispensing sweetness unto chaos, never doubting the basic serenity of the world and its need for Julie Andrews? She will always be the First Lady of Disney: twin-set and pearls can only augment her majesty. Yet you suspect that Julie Andrews stares into the middle distance in this gentle urban drama of high schools and sweethearts with a sense of some higher calling. Some distant music reverberates into the few film roles she has taken in recent years. There’s a sort of nostalgia in her eyes: the hills are alive. Anne Hathaway is not too convincing as a gawky high-school saddo; she scrubs up far too well, but still she manages to provide a quite touching counterpoint to the strange certainties of her grandmother. In the end, it’s all perfectly nice, and the fact is that Garry Marshall is again quite scrupulous in the creation of a world where nothing very bad
