This is a guy who wears a corduroy blazer wherever he goes, regardless of the weather, and women are tossing their panties at him on stage. This is actually an amusing idea that could have been dragged out longer: Henry’s confusion over the response to his book, and the disparity between what’s actually in it and the way women everywhere throw themselves at him. Henry’s halting delivery and paltry knowledge of Spanish offer some easy, fish-out-of-water laughs. Claflin is very much in 1990s Hugh Grant mode here, fumbling and bumbling his way through every scenario. An aspiring writer herself, she viewed it as an opportunity to practice her craft and lift herself from the doldrums of waiting tables at a neighborhood bar to support her young son.īut in the process, Maria turns Henry into an unlikely sex symbol.
And once he arrives there to bask in the adulation and drum up sales, he finds out why: The translator, Maria Rodriguez (Echegui), rewrote the whole thing in Spanish, turning it into a hot-and-heavy bodice ripper. But then his rude and demanding publicist ( Lucy Punch) informs him that, surprisingly, “The Sensible Heart” is a huge hit in Mexico. It’s a romance novel without the romance patience is more important than passion. Claflin plays Henry Copper, a London novelist whose latest work, “The Sensible Heart,” is such a dud that he draws only three people to his in-store book reading-one of whom is his publicist. There’s some promise at the beginning, though.