E-Mail This Article to a Friend In Her Shoes

130 minutes|Boston Common + Fenway + Fresh Pond + harvard Square + chestnut hill + suburbs

You wouldn’t know it from L.A. Confidential or 8 Mile, but Curtis Hanson knows his way around a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Also around a dysfunctional family, whether it’s the LAPD, an Oedipal rapper and his mom, or, in this case, a pair of mismatched sisters. Rose (Toni Collette) is the legal profession’s equivalent of Reese Witherspoon’s doctor in Just like Heaven; she’s a career woman with a closet full of footwear but no sex life. Her sister, Maggie (Cameron Diaz), is a slut with the same shoe size as Rose, but no career. When Maggie spitefully sleeps with the creep Rose has her eye on, she’s driven from Rose’s Manhattan condo and ends up at a Florida retirement community with the girls’ long-estranged grandma (Shirley MacLaine). Though at times Shoes looks as if it might wander off in the disparate directions of Terms of Endearment and Sex and the City, Hanson’s skill with actors keeps the film’s feet on the ground. It’s a trifle, but, with its mix of sentiment and tart humor, one that’s comfortable and stylish.