A Tough Time for Rom-Coms
Lately, I find myself re-watching a lot of romantic comedies. When you've seen Notting Hill, When Harry Met Sally, or Love Actually so often, there ought to be a good explanation for spending your time this way. So, what is it?
One reason - they don't make too many of these movies anymore so there aren't a lot of new ones to see. So far this year, only Beauty and the Beast comes close, but it's fantasy more than reality, and the comedy is in the dancing teacups and candles more than in the interaction between Belle and Beast. The rest of the year has seen mostly thrillers and revenge films.
If they don't make them, perhaps that's Hollywood's reaction to the assumption that people would rather watch crashing cars, monsters (alien and human) and futuristic weapons than two people going through the drama and angst of finding love. Maybe the audience wants escapism. Maybe it wants to see right make might in a world where it seems that the bad guys are always a threat. Maybe we have become just too jaded to fall for the sentimental.
Well, in any case, that doesn't describe me. I like it when the average guy, a failed bookseller, gets the starlet in Notting Hill, not because I'm projecting but because it reminds me that what matters most is who you are, not what you do. I like it when Harry finally discovers that he loves Sally, even if it did take him ten years. And the attraction is not because she has no flaws and quirks but because those flaws and quirks are a large part of what captivates him - and vice versa. They "complete him" as Tom Cruise told Renee Zellweger in Jerry Maguire. It comforts me when Jamie (Colin Firth) and Aurelia (Lucia Muniz) find a way to communicate across cultures and languages in the reality that love means taking a risk when you've been - or might get - hurt. I laugh when Hillary Swank makes a fool of herself to assuage her pain in P.S. I Love You because we all make fools of ourselves when we love deeply and because laughter is the cheapest medicine for heartbreak. I like it because, in Rom-Coms, people are nice to each other, in the end if not always in the beginning, because they remain open when they could be self-protective, and because there remains a part of them that is eternally hopeful.
I admit. I also like it when things work out in the end, which is why it disturbed me to see Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling go their separate ways at the conclusion of La La Land. Until that point, this was a love story, so when they chose commitment to career over commitment to each other, it seemed to please the critics much more than me. Realistic? Unsentimental? The way things are? Perhaps - at least in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But is that a gain or a loss? I don't see why they couldn't have had a career and a life-long love affair. Sure, they would have had to make some sacrifices. Maybe they wouldn't have reached the top of their professions, but they would have been enriched much more by sharing their love through the years.
In the end, I'd have found that ending far more satisfying - and realistic. Our lives are testimony to the centrality of love, to the importance of commitment, to the need to find someone who sees the best in us and whose support is most often unconditional and, yes, sometimes self-sacrificing. So, it's back to Leap Year for me, where Amy Adams finds that a cardiologist, his money and their "to-die-for" high-rise condo are just no match for a down-on-his-luck Irish barkeep whose most attractive quality is that he can see the truth of her life and offer her a future that is filled with that truth.
Photo Credit: JL Stricklin
