Looking for a few good women
Jul 24, 2007, 03:50 PM | by Gary Susman
Categories: Film
The New Yorker film critic David Denby is usually such a doom-sayer about the state of contemporary cinema that, on those rare occasions when he hints that the entire art form may not be going to hell in a hand basket, I sit up and take notice. So it is with his essay this week on the state of the romantic comedy genre, something he thinks is looking up because of Knocked Up (pictured), which he believes has put the genre on a new path, towards greater psychological insight, humorous sexual candor, and appeal to male viewers. Of course, he still has grumbling reservations about the movie: to him, it represents the latest in a recent trend of romantic comedies in which schlubby, slacker-y guys get the girl, and in which the girl doesn't really get any funny lines. Both situations are unfair to women, Denby argues, leading to the inevitable moan about how far the genre has fallen since the sparkling "screwball" romantic comedies of the '30s and '40s, when women were stronger and wittier and the men were worthy of them.
Denby's essay has spawned a lot of vehement reaction in the blogosphere (here and here, for instance), suggesting that, for all his praise of Knocked Up, he doesn't really get the movie or why it works. To me, it seems Denby has to ignore a lot of cinema history to make his argument, both recent (particularly, Knocked Up director Judd Apatow's last film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) and vintage. There's a long venerable tradition of the slacker guy (lazy or unambitious) and the schlubby guy (not nearly as attractive or charismatic as his costar) getting the girl, in movies like Holiday and The Philadelphia Story (both of which have slacker Cary Grant landing Katharine Hepburn) or Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (where the male romantic leads are a geeky Henry Fonda and a nerdy Eddie Bracken, respectively). Not to mention every romantic comedy Woody Allen ever made. Recently, we've started to see movies where schlubby girls land hot guys; think My Big Fat Greek Wedding and the Bridget Jones movies. So there's some of the parity Denby is looking for, though I think he hoped movies would achieve balance by raising the bar for the guys, not by lowering it for the gals.
I agree with Denby that the women don't get to be as funny as the men anymore, unlike in the days of Hepburn and Rosalind Russell, or (in the '70s) Diane Keaton and Barbra Streisand. Part of the issue, which Denby hints at, is that today's romantic comedies are really about (as they called it on Scrubs) guy love. Wedding Crashers is the best example; it's really about how Owen Wilson breaks up with Vince Vaughn, mopes around, then gets back together with him — but in a totally not-gay way, dude. In Meet the Parents, Ben Stiller's already got the girl; now he has to woo and win over her dad. Virgin and Knocked Up (along with Old School, Anchorman, and other movies involving Apatow and the Frat Pack) are about men who must choose between remaining in arrested adolescence with their male buddies or growing up in order to win the love of a mature woman. In all these scenarios, the woman is the straight man, and there's not much opportunity for her to wisecrack with the guys, whom she's supposed to outclass. (Exception: Catherine Keener in Virgin, who gets a couple chances to show she can dish it out as well as Steve Carell's male pals can.)
To be fair, though, where is the actress who can hold her own against the dazzling verbal ranting ability of a Vince Vaughn? The romantic comediennes of the last decade or so — Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan — all have their comic gifts, but none of them can do repartee like the actresses of the screwball era — Hepburn, Russell, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, et al. Who knows, maybe a Kate Winslet, a Scarlett Johansson, even a Lindsay Lohan could handle the banter; someone should try to write some for them and see.
Meanwhile, there are whole laboratories for the next advance in romantic comedy that Denby all but ignores. There's TV (where, for many years, Sex and the City brought back all the strong heroines, witty repartee, and champagne fizz of classic screwball films), and there's overseas cinema (look at how Richard Curtis has been experimenting with structure in movies like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually). Finally, there's gay romantic comedies — okay, there have hardly been any of those (Chasing Amy, perhaps? Kissing Jessica Stein? The Broken Hearts Club?), but imagine how that would open up the possibilities. After all, romantic comedy thrives on obstacles and taboos, something to keep the lovers apart until the end of the movie, but most of the traditional ones (money, class, religion, chastity) aren't so insurmountable anymore. If we need funnier parts for actresses, and nimbler actresses for those parts, we also need new challenges for them to overcome on the road to true love.
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