Where Have All the Grown-Ups Gone?
by Alison Wielgus
In a recent issue of The New Yorker, David Denby analyzed a growing trend in romantic comedies. Though not the first to point it out, his article might be the most astute of the bunch analyzing so-called "slacker comedies." About the current template, which is epitomized in the recent Judd Apatow film Knocked Up, Denby notices that "it's hard to think of earlier heroes who were absolutely free of the desire to make an impression on the world and still got the girl. And the women in old romantic comedies were daffy or tough or high-spirited or even spiritual in some way, but they were never blank."
Looking at the comedies that Denby profiles, it is easy to see that he's right - the men in more recent romantic comedies are defined by a lack of ambition and their laissez-faire attitude toward life. They might be good guys in the most fundamental sense, but mostly they're just inert. He goes on to talk about the change from what many consider the golden age of romantic comedies - the 1930s and 1940s - to today's films.
The romantic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s are often dominated, at least in a scholarly discussion, by the screwball comedies made during that time period. From The Awful Truth to His Girl Friday, from The Thin Man (which, despite its Dashiell Hammett detective story pedigree features a perfectly screwball couple) to Adam's Rib, the films feature a battle between equals. The men and women in these films are equally glamorous and witty, and give as good as they get. There's never any doubt that the central couple belong together. The alternative romantic interest is either too schlubby, dumb or boring - he or she never sparkles with the leading man or woman.
Today, most of the slacker films don't even focus on the women; they're just there: often very pretty and successful in their careers, but without any real defining character traits, other than their impatience with the aforementioned slacker guys. Denby ends his article with a call for heroines that are "equal in wit to men," as if they no longer exist. But they do exist, just not in romantic comedies.
While Denby talks about the slacker comedies, he doesn't mention the other typical romantic comedy, which is based around a female celebrity (often a Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Bullock or Drew Barrymore) who is having romantic difficulty and along the way stumbles upon Mr. Right. These heroines are often allowed to be witty, or at least what passes for witty in a conventional formulaic romantic comedy, but their costars never really manage to make much of an impression. More often chosen for their looks than any sense of comedic timing, the end result is flat. Then there are also the films starring the real life couples (in recent years, The Break Up and Mr. and Mrs. Smith), but these films often falter, with the pair sparking nowhere near the amount of chemistry in a Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy comedy.
Given the frequency of genre mashups, though, one can find screwball comedy couples in a variety of films. The most frequent appearance of these couples, the ones who are well-matched in mind and spirit, seems to be in slightly more offbeat films. The best example in the last few years might be Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. While the movie is not a romantic comedy (in fact, I'm not quite sure if it fits into any one genre), Winslet and Carrey function in a way that is incredibly similar to the way Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn work in Bringing Up Baby, what may be the quintessential screwball comedy. In >em>Bringing Up Baby, Hepburn acts as the wild, free-spirited woman, dragging Grant's reluctant archaeologist around Connecticut looking for her pet leopard. Grant is nervous and repressed, but by the end of the film he's learned to have fun. Similar characteristics can be found in Winslet and Carrey, with Winslet's Clementine dragging Carrey's Joel around to frozen lakes in the middle of the night and remaining completely spontaneous while Joel stays buttoned up and nervous. Her manic energy wakes him up, and she proves to be more than his equal.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with its sci-fi elements and more incisive take on what makes up a relationship, may not be a pure romantic comedy-even while following some of the laws of Stanley Cavell's famous analysis of Hollywood romantic comedies, many of which he considers comedies of remarriage. This relationship dynamic also occurs in other similar films. In Stranger than Fiction, Harold, played by Will Ferrell (another funnyman longing to get serious), meets Ana, a baker played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Again, the man is buttoned up and serious (he's an IRS agent) while Ana is more wild and free-spirited. Ferrell and Gyllenhaal have great chemistry in the roles, trading barbs and needling each other until capitulating to romance.
This model can be found in other films as well, and it does fit with an older model of romantic comedies. But what is sorely lacking in any romantic comedy today are truly adult relationships. Denby laments the lack of heroines with wit, but there aren't any men to step up and meet them, even if they existed. And while Clementine and Ana possess more spirit than any of the women in slacker comedies, they're still girls playing at being adults, dressing up their insecurities in crazy hair colors and rebellious behavior. The men are no better; indulging in infantile behavior is now the rule, not the exception. There are adult relationships to be found in films - this year's Away From Her is one of the most insightful films about an adult relationship I've seen in a long time - but never in romantic comedies.
Maybe the stars to play these characters don't exist anymore, or maybe we've become so bogged down with psychoanalysis and neuroses that the thought of a leading man as effortlessly confident as Cary Grant or William Powell simply isn't possible. Maybe the message is just that romance turns us all into children. Or maybe the equality of the sexes that's developed as the century has gone on has made us unwilling to make it the focus of films anymore. Whatever the answer will be, the question remains the same: where have all the grown-ups gone?
