|
HUGH
GRANT is sent many scripts for romantic comedies.
“There’s one sitting on my computer right now,” the
movie star says from his home in England. “It starts in
hell. I won’t go any further.”
Indeed,
what’s offered to Grant, the swankily good-looking,
ironic star of such memorable romances as Four
Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill,
often isn’t pretty. Or romantic. Or funny. It’s mostly
disappointing, though being Grant, he partly blames
himself for his perennial disenchantment with what
Hollywood has to offer.
“I’m
very queeny and difficult to please when it comes to
scripts,” says Grant, whose new effort Music and
Lyrics opened recently. “On the very rare occasion
when my interest is piqued, it’s because of two things.
One is that the jokes are actually funny, which is
amazingly rare.
“The
other is that it comes from someone’s heart. Oddly
enough that really matters. There are a lot of these
things that don’t seem to come from someone’s heart —
they seem to come from a conference room with a lot of
hard-nosed studio executives sitting around the table. I
think you have to mean it.”
Indeed,
it seems as if it’s never been harder to say “I love
you” and mean it—at least cinematically. Nothing brings
this home more than Valentine’s Day, the holiday for the
perennially disappointed, when Hallmark and Hollywood
trot out their wares and a couple of million people are
left with nothing but a few flaps of red paper, and a
mechanized cha-cha of love unspooling across the local
cineplex. No one thinks the genre that spawned the likes
of The Philadelphia Story and Sabrina is
dead, but the cinematic espousal of love is having a
hard time staying relevant in the age of The Bachelor.
Unlike
such durable staples as action or fantasy, which can
thrive equally well with swords or stinger missiles,
Russell Crowe or Jean-Claude Van Damme, romantic
comedies are gossamer confections, illusions that
nonetheless need to dance wittily within perimeters of
cultural mores. Unlike tent-pole movie juggernauts, they
need real-human stars with dazzling amounts of
charisma—otherwise who cares if our lovers end up
together? One can’t just proffer Debra Messing instead
of Julia Roberts and expect the audience not to notice.
Some
blame the decline of the romance on the cultural
climate. One of America’s favorite pastimes these days
is ritual humiliation—a penchant for shame that can zap
even the sturdiest lovers.
“I do
think there’s a hardening of the culture that’s
undeniable. I think reality TV—if you just look at
what’s going on this week on American Idol,
meanness is king. That offbeat behavior. You’re left
wondering about the legitimacy of relationships,” says
writer director Nancy Meyers, who channeled women’s
feminist concerns into such pop films as Private
Benjamin and Something’s Gotta Give.
“Reality
TV has, I believe, lowered the standards of
entertainment, to put it mildly. I think it’s probably
harder to entertain the same people with a more classic
form of writing, and romantic comedies are a classic
genre.”
Others
say that the problem is more intrinsic to the
ritualized—and dated—form of boy meets girl, boy loses
girl, lovers reunite. As film historian Molly Haskell
notes, “Sex is so easy you can’t pretend that it’s the
holy grail. The condition that made for the sparkle and
sexiness of the old films was the fact that there wasn’t
any sex. You could easily keep two people apart for an
hour and a half. Now the ways of keeping them apart are
increasingly strained.”
Indeed,
one of the brighter romantic comedies on the horizon,
Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, begins with a one-night
stand between a career gal and bong-toting slacker after
which the lovers must repent at their comic leisure.
“Romantic comedies have become very difficult to do
since the sexual revolution in the ‘60s,” agrees Grant.
“Are they going to shag? If they don’t do it, it’s
weird, and once they do, all that delicious preamble…
what’s that delicious word?” he stumbles around.
“Preamble” doesn’t quite have that romantic zing.
Foreplay?
“Yes. I
never do any of that.” cracks Grant. “All that banter.
It’s become difficult since the ‘60s…. [Before] you
could still feel this kind of electricity through wicked
dialogue.”
It’s
male bonding business
Considerations also play a huge factor in what is seen
on the big screen. Simply put, studios nowadays love big
male movie stars—no one will ever get fired for casting
Ben Stiller. Corporations such as Sony and Universal
still happily make romantic comedies, but more and more
from the male point of view: films such as Hitch,
or The 40 Year-Old Virgin, or even Wedding
Crashers, which blends the old-fashioned buddy movie
with the romantic comedy. Even though the romances with
Rachel McAdams and Isla Fisher are charming, the real
relationship is between the swingers, Vince Vaughn and
Owen Wilson.
Coming
up this year is an updated version of Neil Simon’s
classic The Heartbreak Kid, starring Ben Stiller
as a guy who falls for another woman on his honeymoon.
There’s also Chris Rock’s remake of Eric Rohmer’s
Chloe in the Afternoon, I Think I Love My Wife,
about a happily married man inexorably attracted to a
free-spirited young woman, and Dan in Real Life,
in which Steve Carell plays a widower who falls in love
with his brother’s girlfriend.
None of
these movies feature a major female star as a love
object, because why not save money by using a beautiful
young ingénue?
Studios
are leery about plunking down a huge amount of money on
a female movie star to top-line this genre, unless she’s
named Roberts. In the last two years, many female
stars—including Nicole Kidman, Cameron Diaz, Drew
Barrymore and even Reese Witherspoon—failed in
putatively commercial ventures such as Fever Pitch
($42-million gross) and Bewitched ($63 million at
the box office). After buoying the 2003 hit romance
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days to more than
$100-million domestically, the ebullient Kate Hudson
fizzled in such clunkers as Alex & Emma and
Raising Helen and was subsequently sent to movie
jail, where she played the barely written wife role in
You, Me and Dupree, about yet another guy (Owen
Wilson) struggling with the dilemmas of adulthood.
Indeed,
a theme that runs through many of the recent male
romantic comedies is male ambivalence about maturity.
Here’s a news flash: Men are scared of growing up.
Aline
Brosh McKenna, who wrote the screenplay for last year’s
sparkling comedy The Devil Wears Prada, quit
writing romantic comedies about three years ago. “The
romantic comedy can seem a little mechanical to the
audience,” she says. “When the audience sees the two
stars, they know what is going to happen. The really
concept-y romantic comedy seems a bit out of fashion.
It’s sort of a shame because the amazing tradition of
romantic comedies is what inspired me to become a writer
to begin with.”
Prada,
says McKenna, is a love story of sorts, but the
relationship is “between Anne [Hathaway’s character] …
and Meryl (Streep’s Miranda Priestly).”
McKenna
is now in the midst of turning another female-driven
bestseller into a movie: I Don’t Know How She Does It
by Allison Pearson. “That’s very real. It doesn’t have a
lot of concept to it. It’s how to stay in love on a
day-to-day basis when you have children and are working.
It has a low level of contrivance.”
While
some writers are attempting to expand the genre, others
are simply bailing for the sunnier climes of TV, where
they have more power, heftier paychecks and where women
carry such major hits as Desperate Housewives and
Grey’s Anatomy. Indeed, the small screen seems
well-suited for the intimacies and foibles of modern
love. “I think the genre’s been a little bit kidnapped
by television,” says Meyers, echoing a widely held
sentiment.
“Some of
these television shows are more sophisticated than most
movies and have better writing,” says Haskell. “You have
to have the right people with the right electricity, and
it’s more on TV than in movies. On Bones, there’s
more chemistry between the two leads [Emily Deschanel
and David Boreanaz] on that show than any movie I can
think of. Hugh Laurie and Sela Ward on House.
Even the tension—the male-female mutual appreciation on
some of those crime shows—is more interesting than what
you get between men and women in a Hollywood movie.”
Yet,
while Valentine’s Day might leave the most die-hard
romantics feeling a little bit empty and bereft, no one
in
Hollywood
thinks love has been banished from the big screen. As
one top literary agent noted, “Nothing is ever dead.
When The Break-Up came out, everybody woke up
that Monday morning and wanted a romantic comedy.”
“People
are looking for who is the next generation of stars,”
adds the agent. “No one is going to watch George Clooney
in a romantic comedy. Who’s the next group of leading
guys and leading women? Jennifer Garner? Reese
Witherspoon?”
Grant is
still in the game, playing in Music and Lyrics an
over-the-hill rock star trying to write one last hit
with the aid of a would-be poet who’s lost her
confidence. Grant mocks himself with panache, thrusting
his hips about like George Michael in the Wham! period,
and his costar Barrymore is luminous.
Grant
says this one is from the heart of writer-director Marc
Lawrence, who did the honors on Grant’s last hit, Two
Weeks Notice, with Sandra Bullock. “It’s
ridiculously close to his own life. We shot [down the
street from] his own
New York
apartment. Wherever we go in the movie is where he goes.
He’s passionate about music and he’s passionate about
that strange white heat of creativity where you’re
staying up late working under a terrible deadline. He
just writes crackling dialogue between a man and a
woman.”
That
said, Grant would be more than willing to sign up for
some other tour of Hollywood duty. He doesn’t watch his
movies. “If they come on TV, I zap them away.” What he
likes to watch is “war. I love war. Preferably very
violent.” |
