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BY MAGGIE SCOTT
As initially portrayed by the animated charmer Isla Fisher in ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic,’ Rebecca Bloomwood channels Shirley Temple as a permanent passenger on the good ship lollipop.

Rebecca’s “candy shop” is any designer store that will honor her multiple credit cards, especially when she has to divvy up the charge for that “desperately important scarf” among all of them (after depleting the cash she has in her purse). As long as she has a job, what’s the harm?

This ditzy denier of debilitating debt currently is in hock to her personal lenders for more than $16,000. Her folks (John Goodman; Joan Cusack) can’t bail her out, because they’ve sunk their nest egg into an RV. Once her gainfully-employed source of income is cut off, Rebecca decides to go for her dream job with the publishing syndicate, Dantay West.

When she discovers that the position at its chic fashion magazine, Allette—eponymous publication of the sophisticated Allette Naylor (Kristin Scott Thomas)—is filled, she bluffs her way through an interview with Luke Brandon (Hugh Dancy), the managing editor of Successful Saving Magazine. While the irony is lost on Rebecca, it’s especially funny to her best friend (Krysten Ritter) that a woman whose money burns holes in her pockets is being asked to counsel people on frugality.

Rebecca’s profligate house of cards begins to topple when her most persistent bill collector rats her out on a local TV show. Egg all over her pretty face, Rebecca loses not just her job, where her column “The Girl in the Green Scarf” was beginning to bring her some notoriety, but also a budding romance with the boss. With some tough love from her shopaholic support group, Rebecca starts to face her emotional crutch: “When I shop, the world gets better; it is better, and then I need to do it, again.”

Will she ever be able to walk past a shop window and not succumb to the mannequins’ siren song? Fisher is one of a current cadre of bright young actresses popping up in so-called chic flicks; and even with her firecracker personality it can still be a struggle to differentiate her from her peers.

But, she is a joy to watch, even in a story, adapted from a couple of Sophie Kinsella novels, that seems forced and terribly ill-timed in light of the financial misery a lot of people are or will soon be going through. Rather than take people’s minds off their troubles, like the films of the Depression so often did, this one hits too raw a nerve.

If Rebecca’s garish outfits ring a bell in your mind, it’s because they were designed by the same woman who decked out Sarah Jessica Parker for “Sex and the City” (Patricia Field).

Touchstone release, rated PG for mild language and thematic elements.

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