The Girl in the Café Movie Review

Underneath this cute, awkward romance is a movie with an agenda. The story concerns a befuddled, senior civil servant (Bill Nighy) and the quiet ingenue (Kelly Macdonald) he happens upon in a cafe. Things start popping when he lets her tag along to the G8 conference -- causing the sleepy financiers to get angsty when she makes inappropriate remarks about children dying in Africa. Strangely out of nowhere, Macdonald's diatribe makes only slightly less sense than Nighy's tolerance for it. Their love affair is tender and heartwarming, but the political bent (with closing tagline telling us about starvation in Africa) is a singular buzzkill.