Where Is the Love?

Love conquers all: Newspaper colleagues Sam Craig (Spencer Tracy) and Tess Harding (Katharine Hepburn) squabble, then cuddle, in the 1942 film Woman of the Year. (Photo Getty Images).

Psychologists who specialize in couples therapy have established that there is nothing wrong with arguing, as long as it doesn’t degenerate into four destructive behaviours: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and withdrawal. The classic romantic comedies of the 1930s, '40s and '50s (Adam’s Rib, His Girl Friday, et al.) understood this instinctively. Even without the benefit of Oprah, Dr. Phil and the self-help industry, they knew male-female conflict could make for bright, sparkling entertainment, as long as the audience believed that the man and woman liked and respected each other underneath it all.

Modern screenwriters, even though they were all born into the age of pop psychology, have somehow missed this point. The rom-com is becoming unattractively adversarial. What was once high-spirited sparring has turned into an ugly power struggle, and the genre has polarized into marshmallowy chick flicks (Must Love Dogs) and raunchy guy movies (Just Friends). Our so-called heroines are either dithery underachievers or workaholic control freaks, our heroes either rampaging alpha-males or hopeless slackers.

Rather than reinventing the rom-com, filmmakers seem content to follow it down into its shallow grave. But how to distract audiences from the vaguely depressing spectacle of two unsympathetic people fighting dirty? Rom-coms are now chock-a-block with secondary characters. Roommates are getting wackier, parents and siblings are getting weirder, the bosses-from-hell are becoming more hellish. As the hero and heroine move farther and farther apart, a busy sideshow of freaky friends and relatives is rushing in to fill the gap.

Ever since Shakespeare got the idea to bring in the guy with the donkey-head suit in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, secondary characters have been a mainstay of romantic comedies. Somewhere between Meeting Cute and the Grand Gesture, the Hollywood rom-com formula always slots in some Best Friends. The heroine usually gets a sardonic confidante (it used to be a “homely” actress but has recently morphed into Rupert Everett) while the hero gets either the schlubby pal (some round-shouldered guy like Rob Reiner) or the lounge lizard who’s trying to lure him back to the singles scene (Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn seem to take turns on this).

Back in the 1950s, when Rock Hudson and Doris Day grappled over Day’s virginity in Pillow Talk, Hudson had Tony Randall as his dubiously heterosexual pal, and Day had Thelma Ritter as her weary, well-oiled housekeeper. These minor players were wonderfully diverting, but they knew their place. Romantic comedies still clung to the quaint idea that most of the romance, and even most of the comedy, could be carried by the two main characters — that Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell or Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy could manage pretty well on their own.

Yes man: John Michael Higgins (right) upstages leading man Vince Vaughn in The Break-Up with an a cappella version of the Yes classic Owner of a Lonely Heart. (Courtesy Universal Pictures).

The Break-Up marks the point at which the secondary characters have completely overrun the featured couple. Billed as a star vehicle for Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston, the film received a rush of publicity from tabloid gossip speculating about the pair’s relationship. But the Vaughniston phenomenon barely registers in the finished product. Despite their multimillion-dollar salaries and above-the-line billing, Vaughn and Aniston are easily upstaged by minor character actor John Michael Higgins, whose a capella dinner party performance makes a convincing case for Owner of a Lonely Heart as the worst song ever.

Jason Bateman, Judy Davis, Jon Favreau and Vincent D’Onofrio are all quirked up and frantically overcompensating for the fact that the lovers played by Aniston and Vaughn are patently unlovable. In the opening sequence, he calls her a nag, she calls him an inconsiderate prick — not exactly witty Tracy-and-Hepburn banter — and then they break up, in various hateful, immature ways, for approximately 106 minutes. 

Rom-com lovers have turned from spirited, witty, well-matched grown-ups — the kind of people you actually wanted to spend time with — into horrible, spoiled children. In Failure To Launch, Matthew McConaughey plays a 35-year-old basement boy, while Sarah Jessica Parker plays a woman who feigns relationships with basement boys in order to squeeze them out of their parents’ houses. (She calls herself a “motivational consultant,” but back in your mother’s day there was another word for gals who pretend to like men for money.) This would-be couple is so unpleasant that the filmmakers had to hire Zooey Deschanel, whose nasal voice, offbeat beauty and thrift-store chic instantly mark her as “the zany pal.” Although she’s given a dopey side-plot involving increasingly violent attempts to get rid of a bird making a racket outside her window, the scene in which she tries to buy a gun from The Daily Show’s Rob Corddry — at one point he has to disabuse her of the notion that To Kill a Mockingbird is a how-to manual — is the only truly funny thing in the film. 

Sometimes the problem isn’t that the hero and heroine are detestable. Screenwriters taking a stereotyped view of female desire often end up with a dreamboat male lead who’s so likable that he borders on bland; then they try to appease their equally stereotyped male audience with a snarky best friend. If John Cusack is being oversensitive and romantic, you’re sure to find party-boy Jeremy Piven standing behind him acting like his toxic-bachelor alter ego. In Serendipity, Cusack emotes and talks about the “soul mate” theory of love, while Piven says things like, “I hate to break this up, but we have half a dozen strippers waiting.”

No laughing matter: New rom-com heroine Jennifer Lopez has trouble getting a guy (yeah, right) in Monster-In-Law. (Photo Melissa Moseley. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis).

The fact that an otherwise talented guy like Cusack is floundering suggests that even the star system can’t save the rom-com. Actors of the Golden Age did some of their most engaging work in romantic comedies, but today’s celebrities often seem stranded and out of place. It was easier to believe in Doris Day’s virginity than to endorse the idea that gorgeous Angelina Jolie is having a terrible time finding love (Life or Something Like It) or that pampered, ambitious diva J.Lo is a struggling blue-collar single mom (Maid in Manhattan) or a scatterbrained bohemian who can’t land a guy (Monster-in-Law). The Jenny-From-the-Block act is bad enough; the Jenny-Who-Can’t-Get-a-Date routine is insufferable. But rather than trying to create accessible, believable protagonists, lazy screenwriters are just bringing in more and more funny-looking character actors to prop them up.

It’s not just the movies that have changed. So has the wide world beyond the big screen. Back in the 1930s and '40s, the target audience for romantic comedies would have been folks who courted briefly in their early twenties and then married, presumably forever. They could enjoy romantic comedies from a safe distance. These days, people are often dating for decades, to the point that it can seem more like a second job than a romantic recreation. They’re too jaded for romantic fantasy and too exhausted for insight. Perhaps the traditional romantic comedy with the happily-ever-after couple at its core is no longer tenable.

Sleepless in Seattle (1993), arguably the last truly successful mainstream rom-com, also starred the last identifiable rom-com team, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Even then the characters were already yearning nostalgically for the certainty of 1957’s An Affair to Remember. “Now that was when people knew how to be in love,” Ryan’s character sighs. “They knew it. Time, distance … nothing could separate them because they knew.” In the hollowed-out contemporary rom-com, with its forgettable protagonists and desperate, attention-seeking supporting characters, that nostalgia has become curdled and sour.

Alison Gillmor is a writer based in Winnipeg.

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Letters:

Boy did Ms. Gillmor hit the nail on the head with Where is The Love? Very well thought out and written. I haven't been enjoying watching romantic comedies (and becoming cynical) and was quite surprised to read Ms. Gillmor's article and understand why I wasn't. I too enjoy the "oldies" (Hepburn and Tracy being my favourite) and wonder if the current romantic comedies are imitating life or the other way around. Kind of saddening to feel that romance is a dying art.


Kay Palmer
Elmira, Ontario

I think that Ms. Alison Gillmor is absolutely right. When she says that today's version of the Rom-Com is a jaded, cynical portrayal of one-upmanship rather than an "interaction" between the sexes she has summed up the genre very well. It doesn't even seem like the protagonists are in love. The stories are no longer about couples finding their groove but more so a political statement about individual rights. Its more about "me", rather than about "us". The stories are completely devoid of the idealism of love. These films aren't inspiring in the least, unlike Carey Grant & Deborah Kerr in, "An Affair to Remember". More often than never most modern Rom-Com's are forgettable...


Andy Sen
Toronto, Ontario