It looks like the Duff sisters are having fun in "Material Girls." Playing Tanzie and Ava Marchetta, spoiled heiresses to a cosmetics company fortune, Hilary and Haylie get to wear Jimmy Choos and elaborate makeup, drive a snappy red Mercedes, and -- special bonus -- make fun of those red carpet appearances they must endure in real life. They get to play themselves, sort of, but they also get to suggest they understand the silliness of their roles, so they might seem smarter than their fictional counterparts.
As the movie begins, the girls are also "the face of Marchetta," not only inheriting the company (their father Victor is recently dead and much-missed; their mother long-dead and hardly mentioned) but also serving as the ad campaign models. This makes them celebrities of the Hilton sisters sort, every night attending an event, slipping their lithe legs from limos and smiling for cameras. Ava quite adores the life, even keeping TV soap star Mic (Brandon Beemer) as a fiancé. But Tanzie would rather be home studying chemistry; she's applying to UCLA, where she hopes to continue her father's legacy, conjuring "natural" cosmetics for needy women all over the world.
Their perfect universe collapses when a Los Angeles TV news reporter says that their dad covered up evidence of some face cream causing hideous damage to women's faces, lining him up alongside Big Tobacco and the chemical companies exposed by Julia Roberts in "Erin Brockovich," Tanzie's favorite movie. As soon as the scandal becomes public, their dad's good name is ruined, angry protestors show up at the Marchettas' mansion, and the press starts hounding the girls in packs. This news comes on top of an announcement by dad's old partner, ex-boxing promoter Tommy (Brent Spiner) that "Our future is in the crapper," and leads to a vote by the board of directors to sell out to rival Fabiella (Anjelica Huston), for 60 cents on the dollar. Woe is the Marchetta sisters!
There's more. "Material Girls" delights in showing how unlike the rest of "us" the rich girls are, punishing them scene by scene for being air-headed and narcissistic. So, following the immediate public meltdown on the scandal's surfacing, the sisters wonder what to do, as they can't go outside the mansion. "Regular people," observes Tanzie, "get pets" to avoid feeling lonely. The sisters, by turn, spend an evening applying facials and nail polish. They also get into a spat -- ostensibly over Ava's instant decision to smoke a conveniently placed cigarette -- accidentally fling the offending object into a nail polish remover spill, and, oh dear, burn the mansion down.
With no place to live or a way to get around (they hand off their Mercedes keys to a couple of unconvincingly hip-hop white boys whom they mistake for valets -- the film's association of hip-hop with criminality just one of its many tedious stereotypes), the sisters seek help from their inexplicably loyal maid Inez (Maria Conchita Alonso), who lets them come live in her apartment. Here she attempts to instruct the girls on living like poor people, that is, without platinum credit cards, servants, or access to spas at lunchtime.
They are, it's plain enough, better off without their faux friends (Mic sends his agent to tell Ava the engagement is over, a fabulously gay hanger-on, Etienne [Ty Hodges], almost trips over his own shoes as he scrambles to hide from them at a party). But they're also bored and in need of more plot, beyond breaking their heels and mussing their makeup, to sustain a 97-minute running time. So Tanzie and Ava also decide to investigate the case against their father, believing it to be false. The fact that it takes Tanzie nearly the entire running time to recognize footage from a documentary she watches daily in homage to her father suggests she may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but it does let the film go on for a while longer.
Though they do look "borderline Siamese," as their supposedly sensitive and earnest free clinic lawyer Henry (Lukas Haas) puts it, the girls do engage in a couple of solo adventures, Tanzie's Julia Roberts impersonation (tight miniskirt, push-up bra) gets her into a TV station file office, but also, subsequently, in a jail cell, where she befriends the tough-looking prostitutes, who give her an idea -- healthy, "natural cosmetics" should be available at the Rite-Aid, at "affordable" prices. She also discovers she has a crush on Rick (Marcus Coloma), whom she believes is another valet parker (unlike the hip-hop boys, he always returned the car after parking it at the Marchetta Cosmetics campus).
For her part, because the girls "must" have similar plotlines, Ava finds love with Henry. This even though she's averse to his cat (she calls it "vermin," he calls it "Clarence Darrow") and doesn't understand why he'd want to help poor people to begin with, since being poor is "not a terrible disease or anything." No slouch on the witty comeback front, Henry pronounces, "You're all frosting and no cupcake," before he relents a couple of scenes later and says she is, indeed, a "cupcake."
Still, the most important lessons Tanzie and Ava think about learning come from Inez (it's good to see Alonso working, but dreadful to see her in this excruciating part). When the sisters worry about their losses, she commiserates, but only to a point, as Inez is in place to represent all hardworking immigrants in L.A. (she's Colombian, and has two young daughters back home she wants to bring to the States). "What a tragedy," she says concerning the girls' two days riding the city bus. "Right up there with the national debt."
When Inez suggests they get jobs as maids, like her, the Marchettas are horrified. And so Inez settles for another dig: "While I'm cleaning up after bulimics in Bel Air," she says on her way out the door, "I would appreciate a little bit of help around here." This "help" consists of Ava rolling her eyes and throwing out a pan she can't get clean and Tanzie dancing around in a pair of Inez's sensible work shoes, shocked to learn they are "so comfortable!"
At this point, you sigh. And you wish the camera had followed Inez out that door, so you might have seen her movie, and left behind the heiresses' education and romance. Even if the Duff sisters did have fun. "Material Girls" rates as a 2 out of 10.
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