Paris’s transformative powers have been well documented on screen: Audrey Hepburn took the Gallic cure to become a woman (or at least become alluring to men) in Sabrina; in the recent Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson rides a Studebaker back to the halcyon Paris of the 1920s. The young, small-town Texas women who star in Monte Carlo have the kind of grandiose but vaguely defined idea of the city that could only come from the movies. “Something big is about to happen for me,” says Emma (Katie Cassidy), a waitress whose modeling dreams were frozen in the amber of a Clip ‘N Save cover. Her co-worker Grace (Selena Gomez) has similarly overblown expectations for their week in France — something about re-inventing herself after four years of blending into the gym walls of her high school. No one has told them that the perfect pair of espadrilles can only do so much.
Helpfully, there is a third wheel, a buzzkill named Meg (Leighton Meester) along to steady the girls and deflate their dreams. Meg is Grace’s stepsister and Emma’s former classmate; she’s also the film’s best shot at a fully realized character. Meester’s sweet and sour charisma is well deployed as a young woman who has lost her mother (her father, played by Brett Cullen, has married Grace’s mother, played by Andie MacDowell) and has built up a resistance to much of what the world has to offer, including and especially Emma’s bad taste, birthday cake, and basic human bonding. No one is happy about her last-minute, parent-enforced inclusion in…
Dominique Swain Donna Feldman Drea de Matteo Drew Barrymore Ehrinn Cummings Elena Lyons Elisabeth Röhm
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