This past weekend, The Bounty Hunter opened to audiences who expect their romantic comedies to be a little stupid. I mean, come on. I like romantic comedies, and I expect them to be a little stupid. What was the best romantic comedy of 2009? The Proposal? Or maybe it was something a bit more clever, like (500) Days of Summer? And you say, well, they’re contrived, they’re cheesy, they’re predictable, but hey, that’s what romantic comedies are, that’s what we expect them to be.
You know the plot of The Bounty Hunter as soon as I tell you that it’s a romantic comedy: you know that they’ll meet cutely, that they’ll spar throughout the middle of the movie, and that through their conflict, love will reemerge, and I really hope that you know that they’ll end up together in the end. Which is pretty much the formula.
Even really good ones, like Notting Hill or When Harry Met Sally tend to do no better than leave you with that predictable warm feeling in the pit of our stomach – or mild indigestion at the saccharine sweetness of it all, depending on your temperament. Even (500) Days of Summer only works because of how well we understand the genre – and I defy anyone not to predict how the last five minutes of that movie’s gonna go, however clever it might be.
The real tragedy in all of this is that these cookie cutter plots give us cookie cutter relationships. As any screenwriter can tell you, character and plot are the same thing – so formula plot means formula characters. To be fair, there aren’t many examples in the history of storytelling where one can get rich characters and an unpredictable plot while at the same time getting one’s rocks off – and for sure most of those examples can’t be found after 1983.
Case in point: 1940’s The Philadelphia Story
I bet half of you hold this up as one of your all-time favorite romantic comedies – and the other half of you just haven’t seen it yet. It’s smart, savvy, and has ten tons of love. For real.
The movie begins when rich socialite Tracy Samantha Lord Haven divorces her husband, similarly rich C.K. Dexter Haven, because his drunken binges bespeak a weakness she just can’t stomach. Two years later Haven’s been blackmailed to get writer Macaulay “Mike” Connor into Lord’s wedding with the newly rich “man of the people”, George Kittridge. Mike, of course, falls for Lord, and complications ensue. That’s the plot. But that’s not the sizzle.
The sizzle comes from the character of Tracy Lord, who Katharine Hepburn crafts as a woman whose passion and intelligence fuel a drive that simultaneously draws people in and pushes them away. Through the course of the movie we see Lord through the eyes of all three of the male leads in the movie: Cary Grant’s Dexter sees a hard-hearted woman who has no compassion for any frailty; James Stewart’s Mike sees Tracy’s passion to break free of the expectations of her class; poor George Kittridge might not be able to see past her class at all. So who is she? Who does she want to be? And where does that leave her suitors?
Even up to the final moments it’s impossible to tell who Tracy will choose – if indeed she chooses anyone – because the resolution lies not in predetermined notions of what a relationship should be, but in how much Tracy Lord has grown throughout the movie.
Oh, and it’s also damn funny. Did I mention it’s damn funny?
It’s been a long time since we expected our romantic comedies to be as intelligent and original as The Philadelphia Story. I say it’s about time.
Next week: Oh Brother Where Art Thou. No, not that one.
