New in Town

New in Town is a romantic comedy starring Renee Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr. as a high-maintenance Miami businesswoman and a widowed Minnesotan who fall in love under unlikely circumstances. Lucy Hill, played by Renee Zellweger, works as a high-powered businesswoman in a firm that manages manufacturing plants across the country. Eager to advance her career, Lucy demonstrates her enthusiasm for her job by volunteering to oversee a new account that involves the reconstruction of a manufacturing plant in Minnesota. What Lucy doesn’t realize is that the new account she volunteered for cannot be managed from Miami. Lucy has to uproot her life and live in the town of New Ulm for the next few weeks, or however long it will take to complete the account. When Lucy arrives in the town of New Ulm, she faces a culture shock. It takes her a while to adjust to the Minnesotan way of life, including the community, the cold, the food, and the accents. The local characters of the Minnesotans and the contrast between their personalities and Lucy’s provide much of the comedy in the film. In time, Lucy grows attached to the people she meets who welcome her into their homes. Lucy becomes especially attached to one local named Ted Mitchell, played by Harry Connick Jr., whom she forms a romance with despite the tension between them due to their work. This causes trouble when Lucy is ordered to close the plant due to new distributions of money in her company. If Lucy closes the plant, she will be the one blamed for putting the whole community of New Ulm out of work. When a neighbor shares her secret tapioca recipe with Lucy, Lucy gets the idea to manufacture the tapioca in an old yogurt factory. Lucy must decide between keeping her high-paying business job in Miami and risking it all to help save the people and the town that she had grown to love.