A. O. Scott contemplates the decline of the Hollywood romantic comedy and wonders how it is that so rich and noble a genre, a form used by Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch to fully explore the complexities and frustrations of love's pursuit and all its attending derangements, could have degenerated into a way to grind out fodder to fill theaters in the late-winter season and keep Kate Hudson employed. Compared to those earlier great works, "the dry martinis of the past have been sweetened and diluted. We emerge lulled and soothed, but rarely intoxicated." Sure, some of this is the nostalgia talking, but it's not as if the man doesn't have a big ol' point. For some "stars", such as Hudson (and Matthew McConaughey, her co-star in the new Fool's Gold), steady work in such movies as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Alex and Emma, Raising Helen and Failure to Launch — paper-thin flicks just passing through theaters on their way to steady rotation on cable — is the movie equivalent to being a cast regular on one of those TV series, such as Wings or Coach, that seem to stay on the air for fifteen years even though you've never met anyone who watches it. What's depressing is how the ambition seems to have leaked out of the genre, and not just ambitious filmmaking, but any ambitions regarding serious romance.
In the glittering surface of classic screwball comedy, this ambitiousness was most obviously expressed in torrents of language. In Sturges's The Lady Eve Henry Fonda tells Barbara Stanwyck, "Every time I've looked at you here on the boat it wasn't only here I saw you: you seemed to go way back…I know that isn't clear but I saw you here and at the same time further away and then still further away and then very small…like converging perspective lines… no, that isn't it, more like figures following each other in a forest glade. Only way back there you were a little girl in short dresses with your hair falling on your shoulders, in the middle distance your hair is up but you're still gawky like a colt…then when you get nearer you look more like you do now, except not so pretty…but I've only told you half of it, because way back there a little boy is standing with you, holding your hand, and in the middle distance I'm still with you, not holding your hand anymore because it isn't manly, but wanting to. And then still nearer we look terrible: you with your legs like a colt and mine like a calf…what I'm trying to say, only I'm not a poet I'm an ophiologist, is that I've always loved you. I mean I've never loved anyone but you. I suppose that sounds as dull as a drugstore novel, and what I see inside I'll never be able to cast into words…but that's what I mean. I wish we were married and on our honeymoon." And he's supposed to be one of the inarticulate ones! Then there's Unfaithfully Yours, the conductor hero played by Rex Harrison, upon learning that his brother-in-law has hired a private detective to keep an eye on his wife, lashes out: "No man who employs detectives should ever be disappointed. I hope every time you've engaged these vermin you've discovered you had antlers out to here, that you were the laughing stock of the city, and that you came crawling out of the agency your face aflame, your briefcase stuffed with undeniable evidence of your multiple betrayal, dishonor dripping from your ears like garlands of seaweed," and responds to the man's offer to "forgive your insults" by saying, "I forbid you to forgive me anything on any grounds whatsoever and I may still punch you in the nose at any instant! Now go away and never speak to me again unless it is in some public place where your silence might cause comment and embarrassment to our wives." Given special tutoring and help from a CGI effects team, could Matthew McConaughey say all that? Maybe in a month's time, if you let him take a break every three words to fortify himself with bong hits.
Of course, while a glib tongue may be of great use in courting ladies fair [insert joke here], it's not the only thing. Still, it's sobering how little some of the people in these current movies are willing to settle for. In Fool's Gold, McConaughey is good-looking, dim-witted, lucky, and probably a fun guy to have a beer with. Just because these are the qualities Tim Russert looks for in a president, are they really all you could ask for in a fantasy boyfriend? Hudson is actually chastised for expecting or wanting more — though it's not clear that she wouldn't find all that perfectly satisfactory if it just came yoked to a shitload of money. In the great romantic comedies, the hero and heroine test each other, challenge each other, ultimately prove that each is special enough to deserve the other. For filmmakers who prize niceness above everything else, this may smack of bad sexual politics. But even if there's some hostility in the concept of romance as a challenge, seeing the leads prove themselves worth of the challenge made for a payoff that was worth it. In most of what passes for romantic comedy nowadays, the hero and heroine are resigned to ending up together because they're the best-looking people onscreen, and have nothing to do but yell and bicker and engage in wacky shenanigans to postpone the inevitable until the picture has achieved feature length. The really unsettling thing about this is that there may be something more to it than a worry in Hollywood that making a movie about people who really seem special, and not just special-looking, might irritate the lumpen drones in the audience. Scott singles Juno out as an example of a movie that does have some of that old magic, and Ellen Page is definitely worth slaying a dragon over, but for some of us, the weirdest thing about that picture is how abnormally reluctant the heroine is to simply admit that she kinda likes the best friend who got her pregnant, even though, as Michael Cera plays the part, he's openly yearning for her to give him a sign that his feeling for her is reciprocated. The fact is that when a modern romantic comedy like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does tap into something imaginative and deeply felt, it often ends inconclusively, if not in outright despair. It's as if the few filmmakers left who want to bring their A-game to this kind of material are also the ones who are too wised-up to believe in happy endings.