Romantic Comedy is the hardest of all genres to get right, which is why there are so many duff ones around. The Western concept of romance is already shaped by a century of movies and weighted by cliché and delusion:
There is only one true love for you in the entire world, but never mind, because you will find him/her, everything must end happily ever after, and no-one gives a toss about what happens afterwards. Never mind that the successful relationships are the ones built on compromise, sacrifice and a lot of hard graft after the initial passion wears off; rom-coms aren’t interested in that, and neither are their fans — they want instant gratification and assurances that everything will continue to be all right, for ever and ever.
So how do you express emotional truths within a formula which demands a rose-tinted approach in order to please its target audience? Here are five rom-coms which manage to get some of it right, some of the time, which have female leads you don’t want to slap, smart one-liners, sassy supporting players and/or a smidgeon of honesty. Four of them also feature cute kids, but hey, you can’t have everything.
OVERBOARD (1987)
“I’m not bored. I’m quite happy. Everyone wants to be me!”
Garry Marshall is frowned upon by serious film critics – not without reason – but years of sitcom experience have made him a dab hand at comic timing, and he gets everything right in this smashing screwball romance. Goldie Hawn has never been better than as a rich bitch who falls off her yacht and gets washed ashore with amnesia in an Oregon backwater called Elk Snout, where widowed carpenter Kurt Russell settles an unpaid debt by claiming she’s his wife and mother to four unruly sons, the youngest of whom insists on speaking like Pee-wee Herman.
Like 10 Things I Hate About You, it’s a variation on The Taming of the Shrew which skates around potentially offensive material (unfulfilled woman finds true happiness as a domestic drudge) but Marshall dodges the plot’s sleazier elements by making it clear that Russell never takes sexual advantage of his amnesiac “guest”. Goldie and Kurt have real chemistry and Hawn’s obnoxiousness is so funny it’s a shame she has to reform.
Feisty Female? She’s a spoilt plutocrat. But a sexy one. Then she’s a housewife. But a feisty one.
Cute Kid? Four of them, all fairly obnoxious.
How Would It Work Played Straight? Rather well. See Julio Medem’s bewitching La ardilla roja (The Red Squirrel), in which a suicidal young man claims an amnesiac woman is his girlfriend.
Extra points? Edward Herrmann as Hawn’s husband (“I was whacking the donkey with painted ladies”), Katherine Helmond as her mother, Roddy McDowell as her butler.
10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (1999)
“Romantic? Hemingway? He was an abusive, alcoholic misogynist who squandered half of his life hanging around Picasso trying to nail his leftovers.”
First and best of the high-school Shakespeare updates — followed by O (Othello), Get Over It (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and She’s the Man (Twelfth Night) — this is a delightful transposition of The Taming of the Shrew to contemporary Seattle, anchored by a couple of likeable central performances by then up-and-coming stars Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger. An obstetrician anxious about teen pregnancy decrees that his younger daughter, Bianca, can’t go on a date until her elder sister Kat (Stiles) starts going out with boys. Since Kat’s a snippy feminist whose nose is invariably buried in The Bell Jar, prospects don’t look rosy until Bianca’s would-be beau bribes a broody Jim Morrison lookalike (Ledger) to take her on.
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