Who Killed the Love Story?
Thursday, Aug. 09, 2007
Time Magazine
By Belinda Luscombe
Correction Appended Aug. 10, 2007
Somewhere in the outer reaches of outback Australia, a place where there are few paved roads and, since it's winter, the temperature gets to only 98°F (37°C), Nicole Kidman is trying to fall in love. This is an incredibly risky thing to do. Not because it's difficult: the object of her affection is Hugh Jackman, a broad-shouldered swoony hunk of the old school. And not because a lot of her needs--Chanel, lip gloss, salad--aren't available in nearby Kununurra, and the nearest substantial town is about 350 miles (560 km) away. It's because Kidman & Co. are making a big, $130 million--plus historical romantic drama. The kind of movie hardly anyone makes anymore. The kind of movie people seem to stay away from in droves. The kind of movie studios take a huge, bitterly cold bath in.
The most successful movie of all time by almost any standard, Titanic, will be 10 years old this year. It made roughly $600 million in the U.S. and won 11 Academy Awards. That same year, As Good as It Gets, My Best Friend's Wedding and Good Will Hunting, all of them romantic to the core, were among the top 10 box-office draws. Since then, however, not one romantic drama has cracked that list. The only love story this century to be among the five highest-grossing movies of its year was My Big Fat Greek Wedding. So the Kidman-Jackman epic, known by the least lovey-dovey name anyone could come up with, Australia, is, if not swimming against the tide, at least staring into a gritty desert wind.
Is it finally over between us and amour? After decades as one of cinema's favorite subjects and centuries as the engine of novels and songs, romance faces a cold shoulder as a subject worthy of our attention. The recent movie calendar is pockmarked with the craters of little romantic bombs (Catch and Release, In the Land of Women and The Ex).
Why the harsh reception? Is it that several decades of sexual liberation and feminism and a decade of Internet dating have fundamentally altered the potency or chemistry of the traditional love story? Or is it more that romance has had its power drained by an industry that is increasingly geared toward films that gush rather than trickle money? Who killed the great American love story?
Talk to a romance fan, and you'll find she is one unfulfilled woman. "I'm as opposed to sap as the next guy, but intelligent romantic movies, either dramatic or humorous, are few and far between," says Lisa Salazar, 45, a divorced Houston attorney who likes movies enough to have seen 92 last year and maintains a little blog sharing her opinions. She's not the only one. "I asked my friend Alyssa for some advice on romance, and she said that she sticks to the classics," says Genna Gallegos, of Golden, Colo. "She's a huge fan of Audrey Hepburn films." Alyssa and Genna are 17 years old. When teenagers, the sweetest fruit on capitalism's vine, have to use a half-century-old product because they can't find a more recent model that works for them, there is something seriously wrong with an industry.
But everyone in that industry, apparently, is dying to make a romantic movie. "I've always really wanted to make a successful love story. I think a lot of us in this business do," says John Davis, who has produced more than 80 movies, most recently Norbit. "It's hard. It's hard to find really great unique stories. And it's very, very hard to get the studios to want to finance them."
Nu-uh, say the studios. Not us. "I think actors and filmmakers are a little more wary of it than studios are," says New Line's head of production, Toby Emmerich. "I get the sense that actors, stars you really want to be in business with, are interested in things that are a little edgier, that are a little more subversive."
New Line is distributing the filmed version of Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera, and since Latin female stars have higher wattage than ever, it would seem felicitous timing. But you won't find one of them in this movie. And not just because of the budget. It used to be that playing a romantic lead was a rite of passage for any actor who wanted be on the A list. But in a world saturated with details of what sweatpants and cereals celebrities choose, it's hard for actors to get people to pin their romantic dreams on them. And there have been so many romantic duds, it's a risk they will take only for a great script. Kidman and Jackman were lured into Australia because it's co-written and directed by Baz Luhrmann, who's reputedly one of Fox honcho Rupert Murdoch's favorite filmmakers. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett were persuaded to do The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by its story of a man who ages backward and the woman he loves.
Ah, the story. Love stories are old. They're universal. Nearly everyone has one. Which makes them nearly impossible to write well. This summer has brought us License to Wed, in which a couple is nearly driven apart by their wacky priest's marriage-prep course; I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, in which Adam Sandler pretends to marry his firefighter buddy for health-insurance reasons; No Reservations, in which two competitive chefs fall in love; and Becoming Jane, in which Jane Austen has to choose between love and proper behavior. Coming in September is Good Luck Chuck, in which every girl Chuck sleeps with goes on to marry the next guy she meets. All of them, except the Austen, are what's known in the romance-novel business as HEAs (happily-ever-afters), and none of them are remotely stirring, although Good Luck Chuck is spectacularly off-putting. "Romantic comedies are backbreaking to write because they have to be fresh," says Mike Newell, director of Four Weddings and a Funeral and the upcoming Love in the Time of Cholera. "I've yet to find another one which was surprising enough to do."
But it's not just familiarity that breeds contempt for love stories. It may be actually getting harder to get people to believe in them, acknowledges Richard Curtis, writer of such indelible romances as Four Weddings and Notting Hill, because our expectations have changed. "If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind," he notes. "Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental."
More than anything, this is because what we see onscreen in those can-we-connect romances does not seem to have any relevance to what's happening around us. What now, for example, are the differences a man and a woman have to overcome to get together? Their lives look pretty alike. They worry about what they do, about whether they're maximizing their talents, about what others think of them, about the way they look, about if they will be able to make the money they need. A love interest is no longer an alternative to or solace from the rat race; she's another rat. As such, it's perhaps understandable that a suitor expects to be able to pull her over for a quick mating session and then get back on track. Where is romance in all that?
And it's not just happily-ever-after that has changed. The global nature of dating--the access to a limitless pool of mates just a click away--means that people feel they hardly need to overcome difficulties in relationships. If the whole getting-together thing proves too hard, they can just move on. Juliet's a Capulet? Bummer. Back to Facebook. Finding a soul mate is no longer a determined steeplechase over every obstacle. It's a numbers game--about as fraught with epic drama and desperation as recruiting a new middle manager for the nonperishables division. Perhaps it's not surprising that the romantic movie that most touched a nerve in viewers last year was The Break-Up.
But there is an even graver foe than shifting sexual mores and dating practices that romance has to face down. It's an old nemesis, one she has never truly destroyed: money.
On its first weekend, Titanic made about $28 million. Nothing special. It didn't hit $150 million for 14 days, which, considering what Paramount had spent on it, was agonizingly sluggish. It wasn't until two months into the movie's release, when most movies are sputtering out, that Titanic proved its mettle. My Big Fat Greek Wedding started even smaller. Romantic movies don't open well. The one with the highest opening weekend is Will Smith's Hitch, which, at $43 million, is considered an underperformance for him.
Why should that matter? It's all legal currency, no? Well, no. Not to Hollywood. Studios make most of their box-office money in the first 10 days of a movie's release, when they take in 90% of the movie's profits and the cinema owners, or exhibitors, get the rest. After two weeks, they generally split the proceeds 70/30 and then down from there. Spider-Man 3, the most successful movie in America so far this year, made 45% of its profits to date on the first weekend. Titanic, by contrast, made 5%. The studios don't just want money, they want it fast. Spidey fast. Otherwise the guy who sells the popcorn and makes sure the toilets are clean gets too much of it.
Opening a movie big is not rocket science. It involves spending a lot of moolah on special effects and on preopening publicity. But even more, it involves appealing to the type of people for whom seeing a movie the first weekend is important: young men. Thus there are a lot of movies--this is not sexist, it's just business--about superheroes, things blowing up and terrifying ordeals at the hands of ghastly psychos. (To be fair, research shows young women also enjoy the last.) Then the guys--or girls--can attain some social status from being able to discuss the cool scenes. Nobody goes to work or class the next day and says, "You gotta go see that awesome broken heart!"
Where does this all leave the romantic movie? Alas, in the hands of young men. The only relationship film that has drawn a crowd this year is June's Knocked Up, in which a guy and a girl meet, have drunken sex, get pregnant and then, 44 minutes and dozens of penis jokes later, actually have something that resembles a tender scene. Not exactly a femme fantasy, but more than half the people who went to see the film on opening weekend were women, and two-thirds were couples, who helped propel it to $145 million and counting. Aug. 17 brings us Superbad, concocted by Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, who, respectively, directed and starred in Knocked Up. It too has the trappings of a love story--boys have comic misadventures as they try to get the girls of their dreams--but it's so steeped in men's bathroom humor, you half expect to see one of those colorful little urinal cakes somewhere at your feet when it's over.
In these tales, one of the chief obstacles to HEA is the man himself. You can just feel the tension. Will he grow up in time to exhibit the 15 minutes of normal behavior he needs to get the girl?
And, more wrenching still: Can he separate enough from his buddies to try? It's notable that while there's a black hole where romantic love used to be, man love is all around. Not homoerotic love, although there are hints of that too in, say, 300. This is the kind of sacrificial, I'll-do-anything-for-you love that we associate with young lovers. Ocean's Thirteen is essentially the story of what guys will do to avenge the frilly-shirt-wearing Vegas moneyman they adore. (One of them writes him love letters!) Spider-Man 3 is as much about Peter Parker and erstwhile best friend Harry Osborn getting back together as it is about Peter and Mary Jane. In Knocked Up, the courtship that's most fun to watch is that between the two potential brothers-in-law.
Superbad is the purest iteration of the so-called bromance form yet. Two best friends, Seth and Evan, on the verge of graduating from high school, have to get booze, get over the fact that they're about to go their separate ways and get girls before the night is out. It sounds sweet, but it opens with Seth discussing with Evan which porn website they should subscribe to for the summer. (Top contender: Vagtastic.com. He also notes how jealous he is that the infant Evan got to nurse on Evan's mom's breasts. And it gets more vulgar from there.
After an early screening, attended by Rogen, who co-wrote it, and Apatow, who produced it, a young guy stood up in the audience to address the filmmakers. "I love this movie," he said. "I'm here with my future wife, and we learned a lot tonight." The new model for intimate human relations is the platonic love of one emotionally underdeveloped adolescent boy for another. God help us all.
The original version of this story had incorrect information about New Line's involvement with the filmed version of Gabriel Garia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera.
With reporting by Hilary Hylton / Austin Texas, Rita Healy / Denver