I was raised on two great eras of romantic comedies. It represents two even halves lowering themselves toward each other - by making admissions, revealing vulnerabilities, giving in to magnetism - until both sides meet in the middle, ready to go somewhere deeper together, somewhere the audience won’t see. One ideal structure for this is the “drawbridge.” The word applies more obviously to romantic melodramas, in which two lovers are kept apart by geography or time I’m actually stealing this application from the New Yorker critic David Denby, who used it to describe the way Jude Law and Nicole Kidman find their way to each other across the brutal terrain of “Cold Mountain.” But the drawbridge is also perfect for the purer aims of romantic comedy.
This is moviemaking that explores a basic human wonder about how to connect with a person who’s not you. So maybe it’s the most featherweight of genres - but maybe it’s also among the most important. This was work determined, across the whole history of cinema, to find something funny about loneliness, curiosity, attraction, intimacy, conflict and rapprochement. And at their best, they do much more: They make you believe in the power of communion. They take our primal hunger to connect with one another and give it a story. These are the lowest-stakes movies we have that are also about our highest standards for ourselves, movies predicated on the improvement of communication, the deciphering of strangers and the performance of more degrees of honesty than I ever knew existed - gentle, cruel, blunt, clarifying, T.M.I., strategic, tardy, medical, sexual, sartorial. Enjoy your spot in antiquity! Say hi to westerns for me.Īnd yet here I am, in a state of panicked rumination: Who are we without these movies? Romantic comedy is the only genre committed to letting relatively ordinary people - no capes, no spaceships, no infinite sequels - figure out how to deal meaningfully with another human being.
(Back in 2008, a study in Scotland concluded that watching them can create unrealistic expectations of romantic partners.) Good riddance, you might cry. Don’t women in movies have better things to do than wonder if they’re going to meet some dude? Shouldn’t they be running countries, curing diseases, shooting lasers out of their gloves and spin-kicking anonymous goons over casino balconies? Also: How is it that a genre this old could rarely bring itself to include anyone other than wealthy straight white folks? At its worst, these movies could be painfully formulaic, corny, retrograde about gender and so unrealistic about love that they were often accused of poisoning real-life romance. You could easily see the genre’s demise as a form of justice. The conventions of romantic comedy are now considered absurd and foreign enough that a regular comedy can laugh about how ridiculous it would be to exist in a romantic one. So far this year, the thing that has come closest is a sendup that requires Rebel Wilson to imagine she’s in a romantic comedy while she’s actually in a coma. In 2009, seven of the 50 highest-grossing films in North America were some kind of romantic comedy. Genuine romantic comedies have vanished entirely. Half the time, what gets labeled “romantic comedy” is just anything with ordinary women in it ( “Book Club” is a deluxe ensemble comedy “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” is the same, but with ABBA songs).
Now both are essentially gone, and we’re making do with substitutions, decoys and mirages: things that seem like romantic comedy but are actually fizzy soap operas ( “Crazy Rich Asians”), teen movies ( “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”), funny dramas ( “You’re the Worst”), TV Tinder ( “Dating Around”) or sports ( “The Bachelor”). But as long as Heigl was around, so were romantic comedies, and that was something.
Her time as a romantic-comedy star was more a feat of survival than a cause for celebration. Instead, she was tough, stubborn, gainfully employed and - like most of the women in these movies, by that point - counterproductively heartless, tolerant of whatever partnership the plot backed her into. Heigl didn’t get to show the luminance, flintiness or idiosyncrasy of her romantic-comedy forebears she was given too few moments of wit or insight. To watch her withstand the jeers of the boy-men in “Knocked Up,” the cave-manning of Gerard Butler in “The Ugly Truth” or the bridesmaid-outfit montage in “27 Dresses” was to witness a genre’s assault on one of its last dedicated practitioners. In the mid- to late 2000s she spent five years doing romantic comedies, or what was left of them by the time she got there.
I have a confession to make: I miss Katherine Heigl.