A Rom-Com Round-Up

I've been very tentatively and gingerly easing back into romantic comedies over the past few months, after many years of avoiding the genre.  There are landmines everywhere, from "Hallmark Channel" schmaltz to brainless raunch fests. I detest some of the tropes that plagued mainstream rom-coms in the 2000s - manufactured problems, horrible cartoonish characters, and outdated expectations about love and romance.  In other words, everything that "Isn't it Romantic" tried to lampoon earlier this year.

However, romantic comedies have changed, putting some of the old notions behind them while doggedly clinging to others.  I watched Netflix's "Set it Up" and the indies "Destination Wedding" and "Plus One" recently, and wanted to dissect them a bit.  Note that two feature Asian-American female protagonists, which is germane to my interests, being an Asian-American blogger. Two feature couples who despise weddings being forced to endure them as singletons, which is germane to my interests as someone who likes watching people being miserable at weddings.

I feel that "Destination Wedding," starring Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves, is the outlier here, as it's about two middle-aged wedding guests (and self-described narcissist monsters) who spend the entire film having extended conversations with each other, eventually resulting in a hookup and presumably a relationship.   There are barely any other cast members who appear onscreen and only the barest skeleton of a plot. It's really just the two of them cynically bickering at the sidelines of the joyous affair for an hour, before eventually softening and getting lovey dovey with each other.

This initially appears similar to the premise of "Plus One," where Maya Erskine and Jack Quaid play Annie and Ben, two old college friends who agree to attend a marathon of weddings together as each other's dates, despite not being romantically linked.  Of course, they quickly become romantically linked, unlinked, and relinked before the film ends. However, the characters are much better defined than the "Destination Wedding" duo and at a different point in their lives. Annie and Ben are endlessly sarcastic young millennials, still a little idealistic about love, and willing to be raunchier and sillier with each other.  

In that way they're similar to Harper and Charlie, played by Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell, from "Set it Up."  These two initially join forces to set up their demanding bosses, played by Taye Diggs and Lucy Liu, and end up falling for each other in the process.  Harper and Charlie are both horribly overworked assistants, juggling other demands, and are only taking part in the mutual scheme to try and get their bosses off their backs.  I like that both "Plus One" and "Set it Up" could work pretty well as comedies where the protagonists are simply friends. It's the "When Harry Met Sally" approach, and it still works.       

However, these are also both clearly movies about characters in 2019.  Though there's a lot of fantasy in play, the situations are more grounded.  Casual sex is fine. Comedic besties are off the table. Harper and Charlie both have to wrestle with the spectre of economic insecurity, and "Set it Up" opens with a great montage of frazzled corporate underlings struggling to run endless errands in New York City.  Annie and Ben are more well off financially - enough to afford attending roughly a dozen weddings in a single season - but are also more realistically situated in a web of relatives, friends, and acquaintances who take turns weighing in on the state of their relationship.  

All the movies I watched also made a point of commenting a bit on older rom-coms.  "Set it Up" pointedly shows that the relationship orchestrated by Harper and Charlie, featuring all the usual hallmarks of onscreen romances, doesn't work if it's based on false pretenses and bad motives.  "Plus One" and "Destination Wedding" spend a lot of their screentime having the characters gripe about and make fun of weddings - all of them very traditional affairs with formalwear, speeches, and dancing.    

And yet, some of the old tropes persist.  The women are prone to being a little manic and overly talkative.  The men are idealists, if a bit misguided, and always secret romantics at heart.  Many characters are cynical about marriage and throw shade at excessive consumerism, but in the end "Plus One" makes a nice case for long term commitment and "Destination Wedding" posits that mutual adversity is a great way to meet people.     

Of the three films, "Set it Up" is the clear winner for its good performances and juggling of a lot of different ideas, but the other two are also pretty decent.  And that's a relief.

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