The American romantic comedy as we know it began and ended with three people in the 1970s and 1980s: James L. Brooks, Nancy Meyers, and Nora Ephron. City Lights, Bringing Up Baby, To Have or Have Not, The Seven Year Itch, The Apartment, and The Heartbreak Kid are not romantic comedies as we know them. Only now in the face of death do its parameters come into focus: the American romantic comedy is a genre of its time that ran its course, just like film noir, sword and sandal epics, and disaster movies. Even Westerns died out—why not the romantic comedy?
Movies like Starting Over, Sleepless in Seattle, It’s Complicated, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days have plenty in common with Hollywood Classics—Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail is a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner—but these movies depend on a life of plenty for their characters and their audience. Both leads must be financially well off or comfortable, or it's rags to riches like Maid in Manhattan (anyone can make it here, even Jennifer Lopez).
Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey are both gainfully employed in 2003 Manhattan in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days; Failure to Launch sees McConaughey motivated and spruced up by professional girlfriend Sarah Jessica Parker; all of Meyers’ movies, from The Parent Trap to Something’s Gotta Give to The Holiday, star rich, even famous characters: authors, actors, filmmakers. They live in opulent mansions referred to as “houses,” townhouses and lofts referred to as “apartments,” and nicer clothes than you’ll ever see at a cookout in the suburbs of Atlanta.
There have been American romantic comedies since the 2008 financial crisis—No Strings Attached, Long Shot, How to Be Single—but something else the genre depended on was white faces. Movies like Two Can Play That Game were rare, and now that romantic comedies with black leads are being made, they're not playing in theaters. On streaming, they disappear into the ether. 2019's What Men Want was a major exception, making $72 million against a $20 million budget, but pre-pandemic, not that unusual.
The cultural turmoil of the last decade put the studio comedy on ice and erased the romantic comedy. All things die, and while denial is understandable, necrophilia is never acceptable.
Last year’s Ticket to Paradise saw two stars of the genre, George Clooney and Julia Roberts, reunited in what looked like a fake movie you’d see referenced on 30 Rock or The Simpsons. That was scary enough, but it was still the fog of coronavirus, all things must pass and so did this; Anyone But You is out now and stars Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, two young actors on the verge of stardom. But what does being a movie star mean now? Sweeney’s more famous, despite Powell’s substantial role in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, and Anyone But You feels like resume filler rather than a breakout performance for either actor.
Powell and Sweeney meet in a coffeeshop and from the start they're pantomiming, performing the rites of the romantic comedy with all of the energy and charisma of kids at the end of a Little League game telling each other, "Good game." They go home together, but don't sleep together, and Sweeney sneaks out while Powell sleeps. He wakes up, inexplicably furious at her, and as she rushes back to his apartment, she walks in on him trash talking her to a friend of his. It's all very confusing and sad, not something AI-generated but close to it: reanimation. Months later, they end up in Australia as part of a wedding where both parties want them to get over their misunderstandings and get together. They get together in the end, but none of it works. Nothing. Works.
Dead.
Air.
This is an undead movie, something brought “back to life” and just as monstrous as you’d imagine. Watching it reminded me of Metropolitan, but here, Sweeney and Powell are affecting the mores and habits of the past with zero self-awareness or irony. Don’t they know this fairytale is over? Doesn’t everyone? Dreams so naive have no place in our world now, and sitting in the Harbor East Cinemas on New Year’s Day, I felt tired and sick, watching something closer to a snuff film than anything about love. The romantic comedy as we knew it is gone. Please just let it die.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith
