Picture Perfect

Like the heroines of such disparate recent films as Female Perversions, Wedding Bell Blues, and My Best Friend's Wedding, Picture Perfect's Kate (the pie-faced and mopy Jennifer Aniston from Friends) has an image problem. She's independent, career driven, and single, but she suspects that she must give the appearance of being dependent, home-oriented, and married to get ahead. The movie has an image problem too. It gives the appearance of being against gender stereotyping, social conformity, and materialism when in fact it embraces them wholeheartedly.

Kate works in advertising, where image is everything. She conceives a winning campaign for Gulden's mustard (perhaps the apotheosis of product placement; the idea may also have inspired the film's visual style, since Picture Perfect all seems shot in shades of the condiment) but gets steamed when her boss (Kevin Dunn) puts a rival at the head of the project. The reason? She doesn't have a spouse, a house, or debts, the kind of enfiefment to society that gives an employer confidence his hirelings are going to stick around. Then there's her mother, Rita (Olympia Dukakis), who's pestering her to get married, and the co-worker, Sam (Kevin Bacon), she's interested in who goes only for "unavailable" women.

Kate's more savvy friend Darcy (Illeana Douglas, a brief but bright note) does her a favor by passing around a photo of Kate and Nick (Jay Mohr, a blander Matthew McConaughey), a stranger she met at a wedding, and identifying him as her fiancé. Things go fine -- her boss is happy, Sam is now interested -- until an unlikely plot device forces Kate to present Nick and devise a way to extricate herself from the "engagement" with no one the wiser.

But as is the wont of films of this kind, everyone has to be the wiser by the end, and the lesson Kate learns is that it's fine to be true to yourself as long as you still play by the company rules and end up with a man. It may not be a perfect picture, but it's the only one that sells. Opens Friday at the s.

-- Peter Keough