Southern-fried chick flick. Seventeen-year-old Novalee Nation, westbound and pregnant, is superstitious about fives (her ma ran out on the fifth of the month; it took fifty-five stitches to close her steak-knife wound; etc.), so when the cashier at an Oklahoma Wal-Mart rings up her change at $5.55, she knows for a certainty that her boyfriend won't be waiting for her in the parking lot. So she sets up camp right there in the store's sporting-goods department (keeping an account book of the supplies she pilfers), and delivers her baby in one of the aisles — christened "the Wal-Mart Baby" in the media, but officially named Americus. And so begins a standard exercise in Dixie daffiness. (The nurse at the hospital names her own kids after snack foods, Brownie, Praline, etc. — and so the exercise continues.) James Frain has an offbeat appeal as the sensitive librarian from up north, and Joan Cusack is briefly funny as an acerbic talent agent out of Nashville, but most of the rest is as delectable as a toothache. With Natalie Portman, Ashley Judd, Stockard Channing, and Dylan Bruno; directed by Matt Williams. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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