When watching trailers for romantic comedies, I often find myself thinking “This could be good, or it could be stupid.” Maid in Manhattan’s trailer left me with that feeling; but luckily, the film turned out to be better than expected. Jennifer Lopez stars as hard-working single mother Marisa Ventura, who lives in the Bronx but works as a maid in the first-class Beresford Hotel in Manhattan. The hotel maids are advised to “be invisible” to the guests, and Marisa succeeds, until one day in a uncharacteristic moment, she tries on a guest’s designer outfit and is mistaken for a socialite by charming politician Christopher Marshall (Ralph Fiennes). What follows is a Cinderella-story of romance and stress, as Marisa worries that she will be discovered, compromising everything she has worked so hard to achieve.

Although everything in Maid in Manhattan’s storyline has been seen before (in Pretty Woman, Working Girl, even Notting Hill), director Wayne Wang (Anywhere But Here, The Joy Luck Club) manages to make it feel quite real. Perhaps it is partially because Lopez really is a working-class girl from the Bronx who has made it big, but it is also because the filmmakers worked very hard to inject realism wherever they could, including filming at a real luxury hotel in New York City and making Lopez’s maid uniform so real that she was barely recognized by her fans when she was wearing it. So although the film covers no new ground, this Manhattan love story still makes you believe dreams really can come true.