During the romantic dry spell between Before Midnight and The Spectacular Now, cinematic audiences were forced to seek new outlets to feed their fix for candy-coated lovin’. Against all odds, we turned to reading — don’t worry, it wasn’t a book, it was just a website. New York twentysomethings Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman instituted the social experiment 40 Days of Dating, in which the longtime friends retooled their relationship and attacked their own romantic follies by agreeing to date one another for 40 days straight. The result: a nasty breakup, a return to platonic civility, millions of strangers talking nonstop about the endeavor, and a movie deal from Warner Bros.
As reported by Deadline, the real life experiment will be transformed into big screen form by director Michael Sucsy, the mind behind Grey Gardens — hey, this might actually be good! — and The Vow — oh, dammit.
Therein presents the worry: how will the interesting nature of 40 Days carry its penache into the film medium? We’ve seen dozens of romantic comedy movies with plots strikingly similar to 40 Days of Dating and have been marginally unimpressed by most of them. What made the project so stimulating is that we were dealing with real people and situations, not a scripted Matthew McConaguhey and Kate Hudson.
Sure, the 40 Days movie might attempt to recreate this authenticity (banking on the “based on a true story” element for an added bonus). But… well… we just can’t seem to stop worrying about The Vow. Sure, Sucsy has the potent documentary Grey Gardens to his name, but that’s all but overshadowed by his pseudo-Nicholas Sparks/Channing Tatum/Rachel McAdams picture The Vow, the rom-commiest of last year’s healthy line of rom-coms.
We’re not saying that Sucsy will bastardize 40 Days altogether for his adaptation. We don’t expect an ending wherein Jess and Tim tie the knot beneath the Eiffel Tower. But some of the intricacies that made their relationship feel so palpably real could dissolve in the face of the basic machinations of the Hollywood formula: the perilous miscommunication, the couple’s agonizing aversion to compromise, the frustrating distance between the parties’ values — yeah, it all sounds dreadfully unpleasant. More often than not, it was. But in this, it was valuable.
Among the movie industry’s endless supply of perfect couples, it’s healthy to have one that just shouldn’t be (like Jess and Tim, for instance). To have instead an odd look at something that leaves its audience not ensconced in envy and an idealization of modern romance. It would be unfair to say that we’re completely without romantic movies of any great authenticity, but the The Vows have a stronghold over the Before Midnights by a wide margin. What we need are more of the latter — perhaps an even more aggressive step into the territories of imperfection. That, if nothing else, is what 40 Days of Dating brings to the table.
With the fan base it has mustered, 40 Days has the kind of celebrity it needs to deliver an effective story with romantic hopefuls and worn out cynics already engrossed. The opportunity Sucsy has here, with so many eyes affixed, is to deliver a story that really channels all of the sour elements of Jessica and Tim’s experiment. Theirs is a relationship that no one can idealize. That no one can envy. That will make no one feel inadequate about his own partnership, nor long painfully for one so magical. And, perhaps, one that will make some misplaced individuals take note of familiar struggles, maybe deciding that the man or woman they have been courting is not at all right for them. And that’s okay. It didn’t work out for the spotlit folks onscreen, so how can we get down on ourselves if it doesn’t work out for us?
Somewhere in between the Vows and the 40 Days of Datings are real relationships, healthy and happy and inevitably flawed and challenging relationships, to which we can and should aspire. But with such a surplus of Vows and hardly enough of those middle gems, it might help to have a 40 Days movie — something veritably toxic — to remind us that romantic relationships don’t have to be perfect (or even perfectly imperfect). Often, they might suck. Your next one might not be the be-all-end-all, the one that works out. With heroes like Jesses and Tims at our disposal — heroes to whom we can relate, but not aspire — it’ll be all the easier to approach every new fling and breakup with healthier, more grounded, and more self-efficacious expectations.
More:
‘Drinking Buddies’ Is the Rom-Com Antedote
Joe Swanberg Talks Deconstructing Romantic Comedies
Tribeca’s Gay Rom-Com ‘GBF’ Avoids a Hollywood Ending
Follow @Michael Arbeiter
| Follow @Hollywood_com
From Our Partners:
40 Most Revealing See-Through Red Carpet Looks (Vh1)
15 Stars Share Secrets of their Sex Lives (Celebuzz)
