Living the Romantic Comedy

Does Your Character Need a Job?

This past Sunday's NY Times profile on screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna catches the screenwriter saying what writers who haven't tried writing rom-coms won't cop to:

McKenna came to realize that writing a straight romantic comedy — or at least writing an interesting straight romantic comedy — is very, very hard. “Thin people who want to be in love and their concerns about their love life — that’s not a very dynamic want,” McKenna said over lunch near her Hollywood office. “There’s that, and then there’s the nuclear briefcase. There’s a spectrum of urgency, and wanting to find someone is a not-very-directed goal. Whereas, ‘I need to get through this year and then get promoted,’ or ‘If we don’t get the ratings up the show will close down’ — there’s an urgency.”

That urgency - particularly, the stakes and jeopardy that come alive when a given script hones in on its protagonist's professional life (as opposed to her romantic difficulties) - is the big asset that comes with what McKenna has carved out as her own niche turf:

What feels modern about McKenna’s version of the romantic comedy is that, as she explains it, “the women have goals that are not strictly speaking romantic.” When a young news producer in McKenna’s “Morning Glory” is transformed by a stunning dress, it is for a job interview, not a date. “The Devil Wears Prada” concludes with a reconciliation between the heroine and her boyfriend, but it is almost besides the point: the happy ending is delivered by a better job.

“I Don’t Know How She Does It,” which comes out in September, could be considered the third in a trilogy of McKenna work-love movies — a grouping that McKenna refers to as “the BlackBerry 3” because the women in them are forever clutching their phones or chucking them or eyeing them longingly or putting them in the freezer (the relationship maybe be put on ice, but only temporarily).

McKenna can also do straight relationship-centric stuff well, as her effective 27 Dresses of a few years back has proven (while kicking off what's become a full-fledged Katherine Heigl backlash).  Meanwhile, what resonates for me in her success story is a question it poses for romantic comedy scribes: Does your protagonist have a job that really matters?  And is your movie really about a woman and her work (or a man and his) in a way that reflects the importance of a livelihood in real life?

As the McKenna profile points out, female protagonists still seem to be stuck in the sterotype of "job versus romance" - the trope of a woman who can only have a successful career if she's sacrificed her romantic ideals on the altar of commerce.  Meanwhile, given that we're living in a particularly precarious job market moment (one that isn't likely to end anytime soon), the whole question of character employment for either gender has more resonance now than ever.

Nonetheless, I can't tell you how many rom-com specs I read on a weekly basis where "job" is code for "obligatory subplot." All too often the "what the character does for a living" in a given romantic comedy serves as filler - it's something thrown in to open up the movie a bit, to add a little extra action and conflict.  What's missing is that urgency that McKenna has honed in on as her ostensible subject: the idea that the gig defines the character, and that the stakes in one's livelihood are actually the most important stakes in the story.

In real life, how you feel about the work that you do is a hugely significant indicator of your level of personal happiness.  Our work does define us - even if it's in our thinking that what we do every day is nothing but a way to pay the rent. 

Character-driven rom-coms that put their protagonist's livelihoods front-and-center (even broad farces like The Proposal) are grounded in worlds that audiences find relatable and credible.  And rom-com screenplays that place their characters in an intriguing but believable workplace (see the McKenna oeuvre) benefit from the kind of real-life intensity that can connect an audience to that most primal of moviegoing experiences: the sense that those dream people up on the screen are actually up against the kind of quotidian concerns that occupy our own every waking hour.

Does your character have a real job?  How much does it matter to your story?  The more it does, the more your movie is likely to matter to us.

Mating Call

Here’s what I saw tonight.  Not exactly the usual bar scene – this was at an Urth Cafe in Santa Monica, and it wasn’t even 8 PM – but the basic dynamic was in full force.  He at one table, she at another, and there was a serious flirtation going on.  Every now and then he would desert his table mate and hover briefly in her vicinity, though he never said a word to her.  And no matter what her dinner companions were saying, her eyes were invariably fixed upon him, even when he sat with his back to her, feigning nonchalance.

Buddy and Jacqueline: he a tousle-haired, pug-nosed guy, aged 4, and she a willowy 2 year-old wearing a bright pink jersey that said “Princess.”  As Buddy’s mom (the table mate) explained to me, Jacqueline had given Buddy a big smile when he first came in, and ever since, they’d been carrying on this nonverbal dance.  Now it was time to go, and Buddy finally took the initiative, striding up to Jacqueline, who was kneeling on her chair.  “What’s your number?” he demanded.

Jacqueline just stared at him, gobsmacked.  Buddy repeated the question, louder (at least he didn’t say, “Yo, fox, give up your digits!”).  Her parents and his mom looked on with great expectations, and in the ensuing silence I realized it was doubtful that Jacqueline yet knew how to count.  But then the adults jumped in to help, and employing a blue crayon and a piece of orange construction paper, Buddy left Urth with a good shot at a first date.

So if you're looking to get lucky when you're out on the town, apparently one thing that works is to bring your mom along and pack a box of Crayolas.

[An LRC True Romance Tale from August 2005]

Mazursky

It starts with a joke -

MEL BROOKS: You're really writing a book about Paul Mazursky?

SAM WASSON: Yes.

MEL BROOKS: I will do everything in my power to stop you from writing this book.

- and from this "Jewish Foreward" onward, the laughs, along with copious insights on directing, acting, screenwriting and living flow on, virtually non-stop.  Paul on Mazursky by Sam Wasson, a "the director speaks" book modeled on the genre classic On Cukor By Gavin Lambert, is both the next best thing to actually sitting down with Mazursky himself (who can often be found shpritzing on "box office, health - generally bad - and pussy" with his legendary table of old friends at the Farmers Market in L.A.), and something more.

Wasson, a prodigious researcher (his book on Breakfast at Tiffany's, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. suggests not so much a fly-on-the-wall POV, but that of a winged Wikipediac) didn't merely sit down with the estimable writer-director and let his digital recorder roll.  His own knowledge and appreciation of all things Mazursky occasionally raises his subject's eyebrows ("Wow, you know your shit," Mazursky comments, early on) and adds an unusual level of keen comprehension to Mazursky's own admirably self-aware reminiscences and appraisals.  Here's an exchange between the two men on the director's breakthrough debut film, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice:

SW: One of the things that distinguishes Bob & Carol from the comedies of today is that it's not cynical. These people are never criticized or humiliated for the sake of a laugh.

PM: No, no! I love them! I love these people! But I hate to use the word love in a trite way... I guess what I mean is, I can understand them, and I take them seriously... I try to be compassionate. I try to laugh with compassion.

It goes on. And it's telling how hard I found it just to pull a few lines from this conversation, since everything they get into from here - the story of how Mazursky coaxed an apprehensive Natalie Wood into shooting the film's infamous "orgy" scene, the intimate discussion of Mazurksy's use of uninterrupted master shots, key to his entire aesthetic - is fascinating.  An observation of Wasson's leads to the core of what Mazursky is about, as he notes that the director has just repeated a line from the opening of Bob & Carol, "There are no rules."

SW: To a certain extent, that's also at the heart of most of your movies. They are about freedom, the fear of it, the love of it.

PM: You start out thinking there are rules, but as life goes on you find out it doesn't work that way.

SW: That's frightening.

PM: And funny. [Beat] But I do love long scenes because long scenes allow you to see behavior, the strangeness of it, the wonderfulness of it.

And we're only on page 45, which is a mere page away from Mazursky's tale of how he saved director John Ford's life at a George Cukor dinner party.  The true cinefile (c'est moi) doesn't know how to stop reading, and eventually gives in, putting everything else aside for some forty-plus years of raconteur-age.  Which is a considerable accomplishment, given that I've only been a sometimes fan of Mazursky's work.

I've responded, of course, to his best-known pictures (a handful of really good movies, An Unmarried Woman among them, and one arguable masterpiece, Enemies: A Love Story), but it took reading Paul on Mazursky to send me back to the rest of Mazursky's oeuvre for a deeper look.  I'll be curious to see if the films are actually as great as this book makes them sound, but meanwhile, what's undeniable is the breadth of great performances Mazurksy has gotten out of his casts, on-screen, and on these pages - Lord, what a storyteller the man can be.

Wasson makes his job seem easy, while he cannily shapes this portrait of an aging artist who somehow managed to always do things his way into a narrative that's as unsentimental as it is ultimately moving.  A line from Wasson's critique of Unmarried could serve to sum up the book's approach: "...an anthem to resilience played at the low volume of everydayness."

This year Mazursky, now 81, was honored by the L.A. Film Critics Association with their Lifetime Achievement Award.  That's only right.  I'm a big fan of giving the greats their due while they're still among us, and Paul on Mazursky does this exceedingly well.

 

Room-splitters: Amelie at 10

The Future is almost upon us - the new Miranda July movie, that is - and I approach seeing it with a mixture of anticipation and dread.  July is a quintessential room-splitter; people tend to love or loathe her work, with equal measures of intensity.  Personally, I'm on the fence.  I enjoyed some aspects of her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, while other things in it nearly made me break out in hives (or want to see Ms. July covered in bees).  In her case, I am the room, and I be split in two.

I recently experienced a similar bout of cinematic schizophrenia.  Researching a project, I've been screening rom-coms and comedies from the top of this past decade, and so I took a look at Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie for the first time since its original 2001 release.  I remembered really liking it back then... which is why I was kind of bewildered by my reactions to it, some ten-plus years later.  Apparently I'm not the same Billy I used to be.

I do remembering Amelie being controversial in its day.  Regarding its star Audrey Tatou (a big-eyed July-like actress), the love-loathe dichotomy was in full display (she drove some men crazy and made some women mad).  People thought the movie was one of the best things they'd ever seen, or found its level of bogus-ity obscene.  This has to do with your take on all things French, clearly, since the film is nothing if not Francophilic to the extreme, but your enjoyment or abhorrence is also dependent on your capacity for whimsy, surrealism, and poeticized romance.

What holds up for me is its undeniable cinematic inventiveness.  There's a playfulness and imagination at work throughout Amelie's antic length that I find hard to resist, especially when the movie manifests a metaphor - such as this memorable moment in which our heroine melts:

 

Or this one, where Amelie comes upon the object of her desire and a well-worn image is made literal:

 

On the other hand, there's a level of twee indulgence in the film that the 2011 me finds very hard to stomach.  One of its most famous scenes has Amelie, in an epiphanic swelling of love for all humanity, decide to take a local blind man in hand and "show him" what he's been unable to see:

 

The 2001 me was moved by this scene.  Today, I can't help wondering: Why is Amelie rushing the poor guy through his paces so quickly?  Why should she assume that this is his idea of a good time?  Why's it okay that she be so compassionate for 70 seconds, and then abandon Mr. Blind completely?  Isn't that the lyrical equivalent of giving a homeless guy a quarter and then patting yourself on the back for having helped humanity?

I'm still sorting through my contradictory love-hate reactions to Amelie, and I have a feeling that a good part of the difference in my reactions then and now has to do with how blissfully pre-9/11 the movie seems to be.  Viewed through the dark prism of Everything Since, the innocence of the time it embodies may be truly difficult to recapture.

Doubtless there's more to it on a more personally subjective level (including the divorce, single life, and re-marriage I've experienced since that first viewing), but I'm curious: Which side of the room does Amelie leave you on, and why?  Have you seen it more than once, and has the experience changed for you?  Living the Rom-Com would love to know.

Rom-Com Truisms #8

A theme that resonates with your audience can excuse a multitude of contrivances. 

I was mostly as happy with Crazy, Stupid, Love as the critics and opening weekend audiences who gave this modestly ambitious romantic comedy a good buzz.  CSL delivers an appealing cast, some sharp, savvy dialogue, a couple of solid wish-fulfillment fantasy moments, and enough honest laughs - i.e. the kind that come from truth-telling, as opposed to mere outrageous absurdity - to win over all but the most hardened rom-com-averse moviegoer.

For the record, the movie succeeds in mastering a particularly challenging sub-genre: the ensemble comedy.  Only a handful of respectable rom-coms have pulled this off in recent memory (most notably, that saccherine stealth-bomber Love, Actually, and most execrably, that wholly bogus drek-burger of a wallet-stealer, Valentine's Day).

CSL's screenwriter Dan Fogelman has constructed a Chekhovian roundelay of interlocking story-lines: Cal (Steve Carrell) loves unfaithful wife Emily (Julianne Moore), while their son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) loves babysitter Jessica (Annaleigh Tipton)... who's got a mad crush on his dad, Cal.  And that's not all, though to reveal exactly how co-stars Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Marisa Tomei, and Kevin Bacon fit into the larger scheme would be a Spoiler Fest (meanwhile, the movie's a bonanza for Six Degrees Of Bacon charters).

Without giving the game away, I'll note that in the time-honored tradition of planting and paying-off, Fogelman has played his hand perfectly.  Via one deft omission early on, the movie suprises us with a funny, unexpected reveal at the midpoint: someone we didn't expect to see shows up in an unfamiliar context, and high jinks ensue.  Having accomplished this, the screenwriter subliminally sets us up for a far more significant surprise in the climax - we're willing to accept what might otherwise have seemed a credibility-busting, out-of-left-field development, precisely because we've been successfully misdirected (and enjoyed it) once before.

Well done, sir, but even so: Given how bizarrely coincidental the story's entire construct actually is, it's kind of astonishing that we can suspend disbelief and buy into it, and I found myself wondering why CSL's plot worked so well, where that of so many other ensemble rom-coms I've read or seen have not.  The answer lies not in our stars, but in the theme.

The glue that binds ensemble stories is thematic; though movies with ensemble story lines tend to be anchored around one prominent POV protagonist (e.g. Carrell's Cal here, and the Steve Martin character in Parenthood), theme is what holds the disparate subplots together.  Crazy, Stupid, Love has not one, but two predominate thematic threads to do the job.

One is articulated regularly on-screen: the idea that soul-mates exist, and that you have to fight to win them if you believe this (Trope sound familar?  See this post).  The other is never directly spoken of by its characters, but I'll put money on it as the foundation of Fogelman's grand scheme: the idea of forgiveness.

 

Again, to avoid spoilage, you'll have to take me on faith unless you've already seen the picture, in which case, think about it: What is the true connective tissue in CSL's construct?  On close examination, in each and every story line, you'll find a character who has hurt or betrayed another, or behaved reprehensibly in some significant way.  And the means by which a happy resolution is achieved for that character is forgiveness.

Forgiveness as a positive, transformative force is the fuel that powers what would otherwise have seemed a pile of ridiculous contrivances in Crazy, Stupid, Love.  While its soul-mate theme appeals to the idealist and romantic in us (as the sentimental "Love is all around you and you only have to recognize it" idea more or less makes Love, Actually fly), the "positive value of forgiveness" theme addresses our moral core. 

It's hard to forgive people, often hard to forgive ourselves, and this stubborn truth about being human grounds the farcical shenanigans in CSL.  All of its characters struggle with this issue - it's actually what the story is about - and all but one manage to forgive in the end (the one who doesn't, tellingly, remains a comedic write-off).  We accept the absurdities of the plot because we want to believe in forgiveness, ourselves.  On a thematic wish-fulfillment fantasy level, that's why we leave the movie feeling good.

You can pick and choose among the Crazy, Stupid, Love stories as to which ones you love and which you deem merely crazy or stupid (I liked the Ryan Gosling-Emma Stone stuff the best, while finding the adolescents' story borderline horrible), but rom-com screenwriters ought to check this movie out for its use of canny theme-wielding as a license for contrivance.  That's my theme and I'm sticking to it.