It’s Just a Love Machine

No matter how wised-up, hard-boiled or coolly ironic we may imagine ourselves to be, there is an achy-breaky piece of us all that wishes to believe in the kind of love we expect to find at the movies. In this millennial hinge where irony maintains its hold over popular culture, the biggest irony is that movie audiences queue up in search of old-fashioned satisfactions from newfangled romantic comedies.

In the past year alone, there was a surfeit of romantic comedies--or at least movies that advertised themselves as romantic comedies. “Notting Hill” and “Runaway Bride” were the monster Julia Roberts vehicles leading a crowded, if motley, parade that included less commercially successful films such as “The Love Letter,” “The Bachelor,” “Ten Things I Hate About You,” “EDtv,” “An Ideal Husband,” “The Best Man” and “Mumford.”

Indeed, the past 15 years or so have been awash with comedies in which romantic love provides either the journey or the destination. (Or both.) Whether they’re exotic items from left field such as Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” (1986), Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” (1992) and David O. Russell’s “Flirting With Disaster” (1996), or mainstream crowd-pleasers such as Rob Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally . . .” (1989), Nora Ephron’s “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), Mike Newell’s “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (1994), James L. Brooks’ “As Good as It Gets” (1997) and, yes, even the Farrelly brothers’ “There’s Something About Mary” (1998), romantic comedies have been bred at an alarming rate.

A cursory glance at the present movie listings indicates there’s no end in sight. Actors Edward Norton and Bonnie Hunt are making their respective directorial debuts with two romantic comedies, “Keeping the Faith” and “Return to Me.” And then there’s “High Fidelity,” the John Cusack comedy about a record-store nerd’s klutzy quest for love, and “East Is East,” the knockabout British farce about cross-cultural ardor. “Committed,” Heather Graham’s first star turn as a ditsy, determined woman tracking down her errant fiance out West, opened Friday. And there are plenty more coming this summer, including Freddie Prinze Jr.’s “Boys and Girls,” Amy Heckerling’s “Loser” and, yes, even the Farrelly brothers’ “Me Myself and Irene.”

It sure seems as if we’re neck-deep in another golden age of romantic comedy. But for some reason, it doesn’t feel like one, even though the more recent comedies try as hard as others have. Maybe harder.

The most attractive feature of “Keeping the Faith,” a fluffy menage a trois comedy about a priest (Norton), a rabbi (Ben Stiller) and a corporate exec (Jenna Elfman), is the easygoing dynamic among the three leads. (Stiller is fast becoming the most intriguing comic actor of his generation, because his characters so consummately assume the burden of humiliation.) Eventually its dicey premise yields to the schmaltzy goo that studios, not without reason, believe the masses demand.

Today’s Demand for Traditional Resolutions

Same goes for “Return to Me,” but not before some lovely interplay between David Duchovny and Minnie Driver delivers the subtlest sexual charge to be found in a PG-rated movie. Years of working with Gillian Anderson on “The X-Files” seem to have given Duchovny a beguiling generosity with his romantic partner that bigfoot stars often fail to convey. His intelligence and attentiveness make him potentially the kind of agile screen presence that Richard Gere has only begun to embody. Driver responds in kind with an avidity and a sensual grace of her own. You wonder what these two could do in another vehicle that took a few more chances with formula.

And you also wonder why Hunt, one of the funniest women in the world, can’t secure a role that gives her a leading man to jab and parry with full time the way her character does with Jim Belushi’s long-suffering firefighter.

The tone of these comedies is certainly different from 30 years ago, when the slick faux-bohemianism of “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1970) and the astringent ruefulness of “Carnal Knowledge” (1971) were more the rule than the exception for funny movie romance. These days, we seem to want--no, demand--the traditional resolutions: The people who should be together at the beginning should be together at the end. Period.

That’s the way things were in the 1930s and 1940s, when Hollywood comedy was in its heyday. The bright, exhilarating pace for that era was set in part by Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night” (1934), in which two seemingly mismatched people--Clark Gable’s crass, salty reporter and Claudette Colbert’s prim runaway heiress--find themselves falling in love but must jump through several hoops before they a) realize it and b) do something about it.

Dozens and dozens of variations were made on this formula. Writers and directors deviated from it at their peril. And yet, within the strict boundary lines of its genre conventions, romantic comedies of the early sound era radiated graceful execution, shrewd characterization and, perhaps most important, very little in the way of cheap sentiment or gratuitous mushiness.

In the movies of such masterly directors of the era as Ernst Lubitsch (“The Shop Around the Corner,” “Ninotchka”), Howard Hawks (“Bringing Up Baby,” “His Girl Friday”), George Cukor (“Holiday,” “Dinner at Eight”), Leo McCarey (“The Awful Truth”) and the incomparable Preston Sturges (“The Lady Eve,” “The Palm Beach Story”), complex characters were propelled through complicated plots with unfailing style and seeming effortlessness. One says “seeming,” because those directors had far more constraints imposed upon their content by industry codes and studio bosses than contemporary filmmakers (presumably) now have. Despite such constraints, the older comedies retain the capacity to bring fresh delights to the eye and ear.

And yet, even with the looser codes and up-to-date mores of present-day movies, the new romantic comedies don’t seem to have the same spark of their glorious predecessors. In fact, despite the abundance of romantic comedies, there are some aficionados of the genre who believe that this is one of those eras in which more may really be less.

‘So Dismal, So Laden With Lame Humor’

In a scathing essay that ran a year ago in the online magazine Salon, critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote: “Romantic comedies have become so dismal, so laden with lame humor and couples that barely spark and so transparent as flimsy therapy substitutes designed to make women feel good about themselves . . . that it’s often surprising that anyone, man or woman, finds them acceptable.” Singled out for attack were the movies of Nora Ephron, whom Zacharek characterizes as the “evil mastermind” behind such audience faves as “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.”

Both of these movies emerged directly from romances from the classic era: “Sleepless” is stirred to life by Leo McCarey’s “Love Affair” from 1939 (remade in 1957 as “An Affair to Remember”), and “Mail” is an updated version of Lubitsch’s “Shop Around the Corner” from 1940. Both can therefore be viewed as commentaries on the aspirations and sentiments of those films and, as such, they both resound in one’s memory as harsh, overbearing and distressingly sour valedictories on what we used to talk about when we talked about love. The happy endings that the earlier movies used to glide toward are now insisted upon--demanded, even--by Meg Ryan’s persistently perky protagonists.

So it’s easy for those who love the classic romantic comedy to see the trend-setting Ephron as the antichrist. And yet, why do I sometimes think that “Michael,” Ephron’s less polished (and less financially successful) 1996 fantasy in which mismatched lovers (Andie McDowell and William Hurt) are brought together by a lowlife angel (John Travolta), works better as a romantic comedy than either of her big hits?

Maybe it’s because I prefer romantic comedies that sneak up on you from unexpected corners of the movie universe. Both “Bull Durham” (1988) and “Jerry Maguire”(1996) were marketed as sports movies. Yet both qualify as romantic comedies in the darker, edgier 1940s tradition. So, for that matter, does “Mumford,” Lawrence Kasdan’s quirky small-town chamber piece from last fall about a government agent hiding out and posing as a psychiatrist who falls in love with a patient. It was charming, funny and novel. But because the romantic leads were Loren Dean and Hope Davis and not, say, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, it sank without registering a ripple at the box office.

Indeed, for the many who profess to want more romantic comedies, few of these movies, no matter how funny or accomplished, can prosper without big-name stars on the marquee. Or, at least, stars counted upon to give the audience what it likes and expects. Hence, it really doesn’t matter whether Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant seem distant from each other even when they’re together. They made a cute enough package to vault “Notting Hill” into the box-office stratosphere.

Granted, the old Hollywood was just as obsessed with star packages as studios are today. But what often results onscreen from today’s big-screen vehicles are colliding auras rather than merging chemistry. I suppose it’s possible that future historians will someday view the Hanks-Ryan or Roberts-Grant confabs in the misty-eyed way we now view Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn or even Rock Hudson and Doris Day. But I’d be surprised.