Living the Romantic Comedy

The 7th Annual Asta Awards

The Best in Romantic Comedy 2011

Last year's Asta roster was fairly thin, and sadly, this year's is about as sparse.  For romantic comedy, 2011 was dominated by a mere three popular hits, and two of them weren't even full-fledged rom-coms, but hybrids.  We could find meager solace in the fact that the opposite end of the spectrum was similarly slight (Is this year's New Year's Eve as dismally horrific as last year's Valentine's Day?  You'll have to be the judge, since I refuse to see it), but the overall diminishment by numbers in romantic comedy gives one pause. 

I like to think it's a genre in transition.  If the rom-com Aughts were about boys taking over (from Wedding Crashers to all things Apatow), there are heartening signs that the next decade may very well be about girl power.  Hell, I'd even settle for a Let's Make It Even decade, but if any one movie announced to the world that yes, Females are Funny, and will hopefully presage more funny female flicks to come, it's obviously...

Best Rom-Com Hybrid (That's Really a Female Buddy Coming-of-Age Movie):  Bridesmaids has come to seem not so much a movie as a force of nature.  Logic and taste have little to do with how fervently some people, women and men both, feel about this picture, a triumph of character-driven comedy written by a pair of female first-time screenwriters.  Obviously what drives the movie's appeal is its portrayal of an all-too- human, flawed but nonetheless empathetic protagonist, and the absurd quirkiness of its crackerjack supporting cast continues this theme, which brings us to:

Best Female Support: Melissa McCarthy, already an Emmy-winner and looking surprisingly Oscar-worthy (?!), arrives at 2012 with 2011 tucked in her back pocket.  While Wiig and Rudolph's buddy conflict was the main event of Bridesmaids, it was Melissa, from her first appearance ("I'm glad he's single, because I'm gonna climb that like a tree") to her under-the-closing-credits foodie sex binge, who virtually walked off with the show... and leaves us wanting more.

Best Set Piece: Kind of a toss-up, since the extended Nightmare in First Class sequence on board the plane that never gets to Vegas is pretty hilarious, but come on - What other comedy set piece this year floored audiences with quite the same mix of "watch it with a hand over your eyes and jaw agape" and belly laughs, as the Bridal Shop Debacle in Bridesmaids?  And after our suffering through a few decades of wedding rom-coms, what could be more satisfying than this set piece's priceless topper: the spectacle of an agonized Maya Rudolph, sinking to the street in her beautiful wedding gown and um, letting go?

Best Bellamy: Meanwhile, on the male side, this year's hands-down winner of Best Mr. Wrong must go to Bridesmaids' wonderfully dumb (and uncredited) Jon Hamm, playing Ted, a sexually challenged horror show whose delirious hamming occasionally forces Kristin Wiig to cease mugging and play it straight.  More Mad Magazine than Mad Men, this and his SNL stints suggest a second career in comedy for Don Draper.

So much for the 'Maids.  Meanwhile, one of the more intriguing competitions in 2011 rom-commery was between two movies with virtually the identical plot.  Having read the script early on, I would've guessed that No Strings Attached would edge out Friends With Benefits in this duel, but the latter did better at the box office, and also delivered...

Best Male Buddy: No, not Benefits' Woody Harrelson as one of the unlikeliest of gay guys, but his co-star, the inestimable Richard Jenkins, heartrending as a father with Alzheimer's, who gets it together long enough to set the wobbly Justin Timberlake straight in a memorable get-out-your-handkerchief third act scene.  Jenkins is always good, but here, the man is priceless.

Best Screenplay: Again, not a straight-up rom-com, it's a hybrid - but whatever you want to call it, Midnight in Paris delivered 2011's most imaginative blend of high concept and romantic comedy.  Not bad for a writer in his 70s, who's been deemed over-and-done too many times to count, by now.  Witty one-liners, visual gags, and conceptual meta high-jinks make this an "actually, I will watch it again on DVD" keeper that can legitimately join the best-of Allen canon. 

And an honorary Asta goes to Owen Wilson as Best Woody Allen: Practically every actor (or actress; see Mia Farrow) who's taken the lead in one of his pictures has ended up channeling the Woodman, in mode of speech and attitude (for Worst Woody, cringe at Kenneth Branaugh's slavish Allen-isms in Celebrity).  But Wilson made Woody his own, delivering an especially amiable amalgam in Paris.

Best Couple: It's one room-splitting issue in this year's room-splitter of a rom-com hit - you either buy them as a couple (a stretch given their small amount of screen time together) or don't, but for my money, watching Emma Stone take the piss out of Ryan Gosling (then casually fall in love with the jerk) was one of the best pleasures in Crazy Stupid Love, a romantic comedy that's a definitively mixed bag, as it also includes...

Worst Couple: No, I say, no, and no-no-no again to the icky, utsy, don't believe it for a second and utterly offensive "romance" between Jonah Bobo and Analeigh Tipton in the same movie, which asks us to find cute and endearing a stalker-like teen's obsession with an older teen who's in no way his match, and don't get me started on this story line's just awful resolution (sexy pic, masturbation invite and all).

Best Falling in Love Scene: The Artist is a romantic dramedy, but regardless - the early sequence where the ingenue bit part player (Berenice Bejo) is supposed to briefly dance with the movie-within-the-movie's dashing star (Jean Dujardin), yet both forget themselves and get giddily caught up in each other is exquisite romantic comedy, ideally conceived and marvelously executed.  And (rom-com screenwriters take note), it's done without a word of dialogue.  Kudos.

A for Efforts Dept: I had mixed feelings about Jumping the Broom, but at least there was a Black Romantic Comedy this year, and while I'm not on the Young Adult bandwagon (it's another kind of black comedy), I did like the idea of its heroine being "unlikable" to the extreme.

Best of the Worst Dept: The year's nadir was the offensive-on-every-level Larry Crowne, of which the less said, the better, and 2011's Jen award (given to the star who's released too many bad movies in one year) goes to Adam Sandler.  Y'know, I actually enjoyed Just Go For It, in a Guilty Pleasure way, but to have also produced Zookeeper, Bucky Larson, and Jack and Jill?!  Get out of here, Sandler.  No, really: get out of here.

Close-to-Sort-of-Best (in an "I Know I'm Settling" Way) Romantic Comedy: Crazy Stupid Love has a lot going for it (a mostly-strong script, though they could've cut the last 15 minutes), some first-rate ensemble work (Gosling and Steve Carrell are great together), and was clearly the year's biggest straight-up rom-com success. 

But I'm going to risk reader ire (Timberlake-haters abound, and the Kunis backlash is ready to pop), by finding the underrated Friends With Benefit more consistently satisfying.  Justin and Mila's repartee (courtesy of Keith Merryman & David A. Newman and Will Gluck's screenplay) - their rhythm, look, and between-the-sheets pizazz, was arguably the most watchable in a slim year of fetching match-ups, and the movie's undertone of surprising poignancy really worked - for me.

That would be all, but for an unusually strong year among the four-leggeds.  A special Asta for The Best Astas Since Asta is split between The Artist's Uggie, and Beginners' Cosmo, two Russell terriers who capably put the comedy into two dramedies in 2011.  Living the RomCom hopes to see a lot more of them in the future.  Bark on, doggies!

Through a Glass Brightly

Living the Rom-Com in Sweden

Why I love the internet: A few months ago, I opened my e-mail, and there was an invitation from a friendly screenwriter and instructor named Arvid Unsgaard -

- asking me if I'd like to teach romantic comedy to the students at a relatively new film school in Sweden.  We could do it by video-cam, or if I preferred, by my coming over there...?

Well, yuh-huh.  Cut to: On a Sunday evening in the dead of winter, I arrived in Visby, a medieval walled city in the countryside on the island of Gotland - here's the wall - 

- had a nice dinner with Arvid, settled into a cozy little room at a family inn, and then early the next morning was driven to the Story Film & TV school (housed in a former military installation), and met nine students who were preparing to write full-length screenplays that were either romantic comedies or had rom-com elements in them. 

I realize that "Sweden" and "Romantic Comedy" don't seem to go together, but as I kept reminding people, even Bergman made a rom-com (Smiles of a Summer Night, which Sondheim turned into A Little Night Music).  These students were a delightful bunch of bright writers who spoke English very well, and thanks to their buoyant, welcoming spirit (here for example is serious-but-mischievous Sebastian, and fun-loving Caroline, who looks uncharacteristically serious in this photo) -

- I felt very much at home talking about cute meets and passionate characters and why so many jokes revolve around the principle of three. After two days of teaching, we all went out to a restaurant, where I ate reindeer for the first time (sorry, Rudolph, but it was delicious) and got wonderfully shnockered.  Despite what you may have heard, the Swedes are not depressed or depressing (that would be the Norwegians).  But the landscape certainly does look Berman-esque.

And on my last afternoon, we took a trip to the island of Faro, where Ingmar Bergman lived.  Being able to spend some time in the realm of Bergman was really quite moving.  Here is me on the beach where a famous tracking shot from Persona was shot:

Here is the little cinema that Bergman built, and watched films in with his family:

In the editing room on the top floor, there are still rolls of footage and editing records:

Here are two views of Bergman's home, deep in a beautiful forest of Faro:

And here is the grave where he is buried with his wife Ingrid:

A local newspaper published an article about my visit, with a teaser shot of me on the front page ("Filmkung larde ut om romantik") next to a photo of a local girl wearing a Santa Lucia crown of candles, above a blurb about a sports star who abused his wife, and a blurb about pigs from a pig farm getting loose.  Is this romantic comedy, or what?

I fell in love with Visby (even though it was only light out between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., so I really only ever saw it in the dark) and all of my students, and Arvid and the School, and I hope to return when the sun is shining and the weather is warm.  Sverige är bäst!

The Surprise of Being Human

I loved The Descendants, but the weird thing is, when I think about the movie, I can't remember a line of dialogue, or even a particular shot.  What I remember are the feelings.

I often think of movies as vehicles we use for having our emotions, and in this regard, Descendants is a certain kind of great ride: small and unassuming, a little slow to get into full gear, but handling so smoothly that you don't even realize how fast you're going, then opening up, going full-throttle, and... get out your handkerchiefs, people - you've arrived at an exquisite devastation-destination.

The studio's trying to pitch it as a comedy, but that's not really the deal.  Not as quirky and hilarious as Sideways, or sharp-barbed like Election, Alexander Payne's latest feels more akin to About Schmidt in this writer-director's oeuvre.  It has some great laughs, sure, but it reaches you in a more somber place, deeper than mere melancholia and as profound as any adult's honest contemplation of mortality. 

Don't let that scare you off.  It's a sneakily accessible movie and it sets off the best kind of depth charges in your consciousness; days later, I still find myself thinking about the characters, and wondering about them the way one wonders about people you know.  Which brings me to a point that's directed at the writers and screenwriters in the room.

We always hear that defining a protagonist, getting specific about his or her goal, back story, and most significant distinctive characteristic is a primary concern, and that's certainly true.  But the best people - the most compelling, moving humans, on the page or off - are fascinating because they surprise us.  They disarm us because their inner lives are at times at odds with their outer appearances and behavior.  They're more complicated than they look.

That's The Decendants' brilliance in a nutshell.  Not a single character in the movie, be they lead, support, or brief cameo, is exactly who they seem to be.  Every prominent character takes a turn that makes us see them in a different light, and a few of them keep turning - revealing more feelings, thoughts, and points of view than we'd have expected.

What this does, in terms of its effect on a viewer, is enforce a suspension of judgment.  And isn't that a beautiful thing?  We can't just write a given person off.  We can't form a fixed opinion of someone and hold onto it for long.  Instead, we're seduced into simply looking at a character, looking really carefully, and listening with special attention.  More often than not, we recognize something specific and true, and we connect.

Payne, here collaborating with Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, has always specialized in adaptation (the source novel is by Kaui Hart Hemmings), which may account for what feels like a novelist's love of nuance in his movies.  And he's come up with a fantastic cast (aided by John Jackson, C.S.A.) that's alive to every bit of dramatic/comedic potential in a given moment. 

Shailene Woodley, who plays the George Clooney character's older daughter, is clearly an actress we'll be seeing more of in the years to come.  Apparently Payne saw hundreds of actors before he found Amara Miller to play her younger sister, and his patience paid off; Nick Krause as Woodley's sort-of boyfriend is another great fresh face to contemplate.  It's wonderful to see Judy Greer do more than play second banana to a rom-com heroine, and Beau Bridges is a joy in a small, pivotal role.  Meanwhile Mr. Clooney does some of his best, most vulnerable work to date.  His awesome good looks get subsumed in a role that makes "the star" disappear, and he's got a scene in the back end that floored me with its quiet, pained simplicity.

The Descendants is an object lesson in how to let your characters and your audience have their feelings.  And it surprises us in articulating a truth we ought to know, but tend to forget - that each of us can't just be one thing.  We're multitudinous, y'know - it's the human way to be.

Archetypes: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Famously identified by film critic Nathan Rabin in his A.V. Club pan of Elizabethtown in 2007, this particular brand of cinematic male wish fulfillment fantasy has been around for ages.  The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a bubbly, sunshiney creature who, in Rabin's words:

... exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.

The MPDG is invariably beautiful, while often in a slightly left-of-center way, quirky as hell, girly, and giving; key to her personality in the romantic comedies and other pics that feature her is a level of compassion for the male hero that's awesomely selfless: she exists, at core, to succor and service the movie's man-in-need.

One could make a case for certain silent era heroines as forerunners, and certainly Chaplin's "Girl" - see Paulette Godard in Modern Times, et al - is a progenitor.  The grandmom of MPDGs is the screwball heroine variant played most memorably by Katherine Hepburn and Carole Lombard.  More recently, the MPDG quintessence was delivered by Natalie Portman in Garden State.

Breathes there a red-blooded American male with soul so dead that he could quickly reject the looks (let alone the likes) of her?  Two words might be used as a shield to deflect such a meltingly potent gaze (they would be Black Swan), but let's be honest: looks great, has great taste in music, is smart, funny, available, and for no immediately discernible reason, seems already way into you?  Tough proposition to turn down.

There's a catch, of course (in Garden State, Portman's character is revealed to be a pathological liar), and some MPDG movies do go so far as to expose the darker sides of this archetype (in a sense Jonathan Demme's Something Wild is a black comedic object lesson in "be careful what Dream Girl you wish for," as its hapless hero is nearly killed by MPDG Melanie Griffith's psychotic ex-boyfriend).

But what I find truly amusing about this fantastical construct is how profoundly counter-intuitive it is, in terms of the kind of Manic Pixies one encounters in non-movie reality.  Reader, I have dated a few (some friends might say I even married the European version of one, once), and here's the thing: such prototypically fun salvos of idiosyncratic femininity actually tend to be fundamentally narcisisstic.  The Manic Pixies one meets in real life, generally speaking, are Damsels in Distress who are trolling for Princes, or to be more accurate, Caretakers.

It's because of this truism that personally, I'm more fond of the rom-com heroines who are Manic Pixie Dream Girl-like... but turn out to be their own, healthily autonomous people in the end.  One such classic variant was immortalized by Diane Keaton in the movie that bears her character's name:

 

Annie starts out MPDG, but once Pygmalion-ed by Alvy Singer, is revealed to be a deeply three-D human with needs that transcend his.  Which seems to be more a real-life phenomenon, if you ask me (an uncharacteristically realistic workout of the "She seems like my Manic Pixie Dream Girl but isn't" notion was enacted by Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer.)

On screen, at any rate, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl continues to delight many men's fantasies (and alienate even more women).  I recently spotted two in Midnight in Paris.  Got any favorites, or love-to-hates, of your own?