Question to Hollywood: Where Did Our Love Go?

More than halfway through the summer movie season, it’s distressing to note that the most romantic moment so far has been Jim Carrey melting Renee Zellweger’s heart with pictures of his African American triplets, the fruit of his wife’s adulterous liaison with a vertically challenged limousine driver.

Funny? Maybe. But romantic? It’s not exactly in the same league as, say, Bogart and Bergman staring longingly at each other across the tarmac in “Casablanca” or Grant and Kelly shooting off fireworks on the couch in “To Catch a Thief.” But in truth, it’s not intended to be. In fact, there isn’t a movie out there right now that aspires to the heart-rending intensity of some of Hollywood’s great romantic films.

Why is that? Is it because there is no public appetite for them? Or has Hollywood forgotten how to make them? Is there no one who can play a romantic lead? Maybe a little of all three.

Audiences will still flock to a romantic film, just as they will to any genre, no matter how discredited or underserved, as long as it speaks to them. One of the problems with romance on film is that filmmakers don’t know the language. The terms of discourse have changed over the years.

It used to be that there was always something to keep lovers apart--class, convention, previous commitments, pride or, more recently, neuroses. In “It Happened One Night” (1934), Clark Gable initially has problems romancing Claudette Colbert because he’s a scruffy newspaperman and she’s an heiress. Moving forward to 1970 to the appalling “Love Story,” the shoe is on the other foot: Ryan O’Neal has a bumpy ride with Ali MacGraw because he has dough and she has nada (and cancer, to boot).

In perhaps the best modern throwback to classic Hollywood romance, “The Way We Were” (1973), the lovers are separated by class, religion, temperament: Barbra Streisand’s character is ambitious, Jewish, working-class, while Robert Redford is passive, vaguely Protestant, moneyed. In perhaps the worst recent example of the genre, “Titanic” (1997), roustabout Leonardo DiCaprio has to fight through steerage and then his wardrobe to win the engaged, soon-to-be fabulously wealthy Kate Winslet.

Note that all of these films, with the exception of “Love Story,”’ are set in the past. Class difference these days is no longer as powerful as it used to be, especially that now more than ever money equals class. If the Titanic made it into port in 2000, DiCaprio could become a dot-com millionaire overnight and tell Winslet’s nasty fiance, played by Billy Zane, to take a hike.

Social conventions that kept lovers at arm’s length are losing their potency too. In “Casablanca” (1942), Ingrid Bergman left Humphrey Bogart standing in the rain because she was already married to Paul Henreid. She’d have an easier time leaving her spouse now, no matter how important he is to the war effort. The same is true of married lovers Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in that highly regarded British weeper “Brief Encounter” (1945). For better or worse, divorce and dissolution just don’t have the same force they once had.

Neither does miscegenation. Tony and Maria, of “West Side Story” (1961) fame, are separated by ethnic hatreds, and though these hostilities still exist, individuals are more willing to transcend them--and society is more willing to tolerate them.

When all else fails, Hollywood depends on the hate-at-first-sight stratagem. Boy meets girl, boy and girl dislike each other intensely. This, as everyone knows, is just a form of denial: They really love each other. Think of James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan’s bickering clerks in the classic “Shop Around the Corner” (1940). Or the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn battle-of-the-sexes movies typified by “Pat and Mike” (1952). Alfred Hitchcock used the idea to perfection when he handcuffed together the squabbling Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in “The 39 Steps” in 1935.

The convention has been used--and abused--so much that contemporary audiences can spot it a mile away. Filmmakers employ it at their peril.

How to Construct a Modern Romance

So what’s a modern would-be romanticist to do? He or she can set a movie in the past, where obstacles to true love are many. Witness all of the Jane Austen adaptations. Her heroines are often penniless or otherwise circumscribed; her heroes wealthy and/or socially ham-fisted. If nothing else, Austen’s characters are bound and gagged by British emotional reticence (a national trait exploited repeatedly in Merchant Ivory movies).

Filmmakers can also recycle conventions. Director-writer Nora Ephron has been particularly deft at that, resurrecting hate-at-first-sight in 1996’s “Michael” (between William Hurt’s cynical character and Andie MacDowell’s far more idealistic one) and 1998’s “You’ve Got Mail” (between Tom Hanks, the big bookstore owner, and Meg Ryan, the little bookstore owner he wants to squash). In last year’s “Notting Hill,” class consciousness was re-imagined in terms of celebrities (movie star Julia Roberts) versus the rest of us (bookshop owner Hugh Grant).

The desperate filmmaker can, of course, throw other obstacles in lovers’ paths. One of the characters can be an alien or, in the case of the 1984 “Splash,” a mermaid. More fruitful has been the approach Woody Allen pioneered in his early comedies, which reached its acme in 1977’s “Annie Hall”: Make the hero and heroine hamstrung by their neuroses. Forget about class or convention. They can’t get out of their own way.

Though this formula was successfully utilized in “When Harry Met Sally . . .” (1989) and last year’s “Runaway Bride” and can be seen in theaters soon in “Love and Sex” and “Woman on Top,” it remains to be seen whether there’s much mileage left in it.

Even if movie makers figure out a way to revive old conventions or come up with new ones, they’re going to need actors and actresses who can sell them. There are no obvious candidates, though there are lots of people who look great or give off a sexual charge, which is not quite the same thing. Cary Grant made sexual passivity an art form--and was perhaps the greatest romantic lead ever.

Grant let women chase him. Bergman in “Notorious” (1946), Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief” (1955), Eva Marie Saint in “North by Northwest” (1959)--they all made him (and themselves) romantic by virtue of their undisguised, aggressive interest in him. Certainly this approach is no more or less relevant or realistic now than it was then, but is there anyone out there who can play it?

Redford did, in “The Way We Were,” as did Mel Gibson, in “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1983), and Harrison Ford, in “Witness” (1985). All of these guys are a bit long in the tooth now. Tom Hanks, Warren Beatty, Richard Gere and John Travolta, who still make forays into romance, have had their day too.

Ambitious Actors Prefer Challenges to Kisses

But while the older actors are hanging on, some of the more promising younger ones are running the other way. They want no part of being a romantic lead, perhaps because it’s not considered “serious” enough. After all, Cary Grant never won an Oscar. They would prefer to act with a physical disability, bad haircut or a bruised body than with a pretty face.

Tops on this list is Daniel Day-Lewis, who was so smashing in 1992’s “The Last of the Mohicans” (“I’m looking at you, miss”), but won an Oscar playing a quadriplegic in “My Left Foot” (1989). Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp are also in this category, though each subverts the heartthrob image in his own way: Pitt, by trashing himself, as in “Fight Club”; Depp, by portraying weirdos and simps (or both), as in “Sleepy Hollow.” (Both films came out last year.)

Tom Cruise, who sets hearts aflutter worldwide, has never been a true romantic lead. Romance is incidental to what he does--drive race cars, fly jets, shoot pool, tend bar, save the Western world. Ralph Fiennes? No--too chilly. Hugh Grant was touted as the next Cary Grant but seems to have trouble finding the right material. Keanu Reeves? Only if he has no dialogue. DiCaprio is popular with young girls, but he still looks like a schoolboy.

The women fare little better, though this may have more to do with how badly women’s roles are written than with some flaw in the actresses playing them. Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, Bergman and Streisand, to name four actresses spanning the decades, played fully realized characters. Of the reigning romantic leads, Julia Roberts plays more off her persona than she does off her leading man. Meg Ryan is too adorable--she’s adorable even when she suffers.

Among the younger actresses, Winslet might make a great romantic lead if she were given better parts than the one she played in “Titanic.” Cate Blanchett displayed an appealingly romantic presence in 1998’s “Elizabeth.” Gwyneth Paltrow, despite the Oscar for 1998’s “Shakespeare in Love,” seems a little cool, as does Nicole Kidman. Cameron Diaz is a fantasy rather than flesh and blood. Zellweger has a yearning quality that works. (She did wonders with Cruise in 1996’s “Jerry Maguire.”) Penelope Cruz is another one to watch.

Of course, all of this nit-picking is moot if these actors are matched with the right material and the right partner. Kevin Costner may not always be a convincing actor, but when, in 1998’s “Bull Durham,” he utters writer-director Ron Shelton’s intoxicating line about “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days” to a bedazzled Susan Sarandon, we’re all goners.

It can be done--even now--because love doesn’t go out of style, even if conventions do. Which brings us to the bottom line (as it always does in Hollywood): money. If a few romances are successful--that is, other than Julia Roberts vehicles--others will follow. Aspects of the genre will be discovered, rediscovered, re-conceived. And maybe audiences won’t have an unremitting diet of meat (action adventures) and potatoes (raunchy comedies) next year.