Not the usual suspects in this year’s romances

This holiday season, as many before, film studios and critics are describing the big screen love stories as “classic,” “epic,” “old-fashioned” and as testaments to “the endurance and power of love.” True enough. But this year, some traditionalists might wonder, what happened to boy-meets-girl?

Among those getting the most attention, we have gorilla-meets-girl in a soulful but doomed mutual attraction, and boy-meets-boy in an intense, confused and secret love between a Wyoming ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy.

At a time when conventional love stories are having a tough time on the screen (remember “Must Love Dogs”?), Hollywood is showing us something different this time around. Instead of just bonding out on the range, cowboys are consummating their love in “Brokeback Mountain.” In “King Kong,” the ape’s love for Ann Darrow is actually returned by the girl -- who needs a human boyfriend anyway? Even in the nominally more conventional “Memoirs of a Geisha,” billed as a real “Cinderella story,” the payoff between the geisha and the wealthy patron she’s pined away her girlhood for isn’t exactly the happily-ever-after ending of a Disneyfied fairy tale.

“For the best part of 100 years, movies made stories about a certain view of love, and it shaped us all, whether we like it or not,” said film critic and historian David Thomson. “Our lessons were about how to look at people of the other sex. How you kiss, what you say. We learned a lot about love from the movies. We’ve matured a bit, and we can see there’s a lot more to love.”

In the new relationship movies, sex is almost beside the point. The short sex scenes in “Brokeback” may still shock some (cable TV audiences have grown used to seeing much more), but they aren’t as big a deal as the emotion -- raw, deep, pure, untainted by cynicism, powerful, irresistible and almost impossible to talk about.

As far as dialogue goes, the new lovers are surprisingly subdued. They offer no heart-fluttering quotes like “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” or “Here’s looking at you, kid.” “Brokeback’s” Ennis Del Mar, the more taciturn of the pair, can refer to his sporadic liaisons with Jack Twist only as “this thing.”

Talking, in fact, can be overrated, at least in film relationships. In the just released “The New World,” much of the communication between Pocahontas and John Smith is nonverbal even after she learns English; Ann Darrow engages Kong with an acrobatic performance.

And who really needs words when Kong roars his longing for her, rips apart the powerful jaws of gigantic reptiles to protect her, brushes her face gently with the back of one finger or gazes with the sensitivity of a furry Buddha at a glorious sunset? It’s understandable why in Peter Jackson’s version, Ann (Naomi Watts) reciprocates Kong’s love. Much harder to comprehend is why she would go back to her first boyfriend, the human writer Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody).

Love songs without words

Of course, marketers could point out that less talk and more action bodes well, stretching the audience into other countries and the desired young male demographic. Nevertheless, communication that transcends words still provides an imagined profundity and sense of relief even for women -- the expected audience for love stories.

The fact is, words can be awfully limiting. We could be sick of talking about relationships. According to social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, author of books on divorce and modern courtship, “We’re in a talky culture. We talk everything to death.” Lately, she said, many people have started to confess that their deepest love attachment is to their pets. “Some people find it superior to traditional male and female relationships,” she said.

In human relationships, as filmmakers have known from the start, people identify with problems. Great love stories require great obstacles. But it’s just not that easy anymore to follow up boy-meets-girl with boy-loses-girl. “We are a society that doesn’t have a significant level of shame anymore,” said director and UCLA professor Linda Voorhees. “If a man and a woman like each other, the audience says, why don’t they just go to bed? If she likes him, why doesn’t she just tell him?”

And boy-gets-girl is equally difficult. Even when Tom Cruise gets Renee Zellweger at the end of “Jerry Maguire,” the experienced among us tend to think, “Yeah, but how long will it last?”

“I don’t know that we believe in happy-ever-after endings anymore,” Whitehead said.

Yet even in a cynical, disconnected time, filmmakers believe that audiences appear hungry for any emotional connection. Producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher planned “Memoirs of a Geisha” to be more than a mere love story. “It’s also a triumphant struggle of a little girl who’s a slave. Through the power of love, she fights her way through poverty and through war.” It is also, they said, a passport to a world that no longer exists.

The most dramatic way to up the emotional ante in a film is to connect the lovers’ story with a crumbling world: the South in “Gone With the Wind,” the cruise ship in “Titanic,” the Native Americans in “The New World.” Setting love in a historical period when relationships were more regulated is also an easy way to come up with some solid obstacles, especially for filmmakers without a $200-million budget to create a computer-generated lover with the largest lovestruck brown eyes in history.

On a smaller scale, “Pride & Prejudice” is still a favorite with the loyal group of romantics who can spend hours watching another version of the tortured social dance between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. Time will tell what audiences make of “Casanova,” a costume comedy of licentiousness in a time of repression.

A simple formula for simpler times, boy-meets-girl may have seen its day. Hollywood might actually be growing up. Even the lighter-weight movies seem to be trying to reach for something more poignant. “The 40 Year-Old Virgin,” a film that began in a crass “American Pie” style, segued, however awkwardly, into a story about the growing pains that come with creating an honest relationship.

More ambitious movies may well help redefine our notions of what love is. “Epic love stories” and “the power of true love” may take forms we can’t yet imagine. Thomson looks forward to it.

“If I live long enough,” he said, “there might be a version of ‘King Kong’ where the steamer is shipwrecked and Kong and Ann wind up on a desert island, as happy as anyone.”