- Before
Dharma & Greg, before Lucy and Desi, even before Doris
Day and Rock Hudson, there was a kind of Hollywood romantic comedy
-- the screwball comedy -- that doesn't want to fade from
sight.
As best exemplified by Frank Capra movies from the 1930s --
movies such as the groundbreaking It Happened One Night
and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town -- these were films that
grew out of, and sometimes were explicitly about, the economic
pressures of the Great Depression. Their plots often involved
the romantic coupling of people from different socioeconomic
backgrounds. By allowing them to overcome their differences,
the films reaffirmed the ideal of a classless society in which
decency and hard work are paramount.
What brings all this to mind is that we seem to be in the
midst of a screwball-comedy boom. In recent weeks, we've seen
Chris Rock appear in his first starring role in Back to Earth
and Jennifer Lopez strike gold in The Wedding Planner.
The Family Man and What Women Want have done
big business since December, together earning $250 million domestically.
Meet the Parents, released in October, was one of last
year's box-office surprises. Even the current No. 1 film, The
Mexican, is a screwball comedy at heart, though it includes
edgy black humor and violent gunplay.
Among several screwballish releases scheduled in coming months
is the Julia Roberts comedy America's Sweethearts, due
this summer.
In 1972, when Peter Bogdanovich made What's Up, Doc?,
his homage to the screwball films of Howard Hawks, the genre
was considered dead. Over the past dozen years, however, and
especially in the past few months, it has grown to be one of
Hollywood's most dominant genres, and it shows no signs of letting
up.
Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, You've Got Mail, My Best Friend's
Wedding, Jerry Maguire and even Adam Sandler's The Wedding
Singer are modern-day takes on the screwball comedy that
were among the biggest movies of their respective years.
This might attest to the filmmakers' ability to reinvent old
forms and invest them with relevance for today's audiences, except
that, in most cases, these films update the formula in superficial
ways, if at all.
Their popularity aside, these new movies are as relevant as
an antique chair that's been dusted off and plopped in the center
of the room. You can sit in it, all right, and it looks nice
beside the mahogany table, especially the way the light falls
on it through lace curtains. But it speaks to the past. It has
little to say about the way we live today.
On the surface, of course, most of these movies seem to be
about today's world.
Rock's Back to Earth, in particular, looks up to date.
The black actor plays a stand-up comic who, after being snatched
up to heaven prematurely, returns to Earth in a white man's body.
The film even features an interracial romance -- something you
never would've seen in the 1930s -- though you'd hardly know
it because Rock's middle-aged white-host body is rarely shown.
In the end, this is what undercuts the film, though amateurish
acting and poor direction don't help.
Back to Earth is based on Heaven Can Wait, a
1978 Warren Beatty movie that was based on the 1941 film Here
Comes Mr. Jordan. Each remake featured minor updating. Beatty
added environmental themes that clearly placed the movie in the
1970s, for instance, but it was a superficial change, on a par
with letting the star wear his hair long.
Rock's movie tries to deepen the theme by dealing more pointedly
with the issue of
identity, racial and otherwise. Who we are inside, the film says,
doesn't have to mesh with how we appear on the surface.
For this to work, though, the movie can't only show what's
inside. It's got to show the surfaces. Otherwise it's just a
tepid remake with a black star.
What Women Want also seems thoroughly modern, at first
glance. Mel Gibson plays a womanizing advertising executive who
learns to care about other people after he gains the ability
to hear what women are thinking. Problem is, the film says nothing
about male-female relations or sexism that wasn't said better
nearly 20 years ago in Tootsie. And while the screwball
comedies of the 1930s and 1940s predate the modern women's movement,
all of them were far more enlightened than Gibson's condescending
film in portraying the sexes.
Conceived as a "star vehicle," in the worst sense
of the word, What Women Want answers the question implied
by its title with one word: Gibson. It is more concerned with
the redemption of a single charming cad than with anything else.
In the heyday of the genre, men and women in screwball comedies
often were evenly matched. We think of them in pairs, because
the movies were about couples -- Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert,
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, Jimmy Stewart and Katharine
Hepburn, Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck. (They were called
screwball because the conflict -- and humor -- grew out of the
screwy behavior of oddball characters.)
With the exception of The Wedding Planner, the major
screwball comedies of the past few months have focused on men.
Meet the Parents goes so far as to treat Ben Stiller's
relationship with his girlfriend as secondary to his relationship
with her father, played by Robert De Niro. Women in these movies
exist either as background or to assist in the transformation
of the hero.
This is probably less a reflection of Hollywood sexism than
of the way marketing
issues affect creative decisions. Most of these movies are made
primarily to appeal to women. The assumption is that today's
women are less interested in watching strong females in romantic
roles (unless they're named Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan) than they
are in watching a Gibson or a Nicolas Cage get tamed.
Vintage screwball comedies were always escapist fantasies
-- no less so than, say,
Notting Hill, in which the biggest movie star in the world
(played by Roberts) falls for a lowly bookstore owner (Hugh Grant).
Even Capra's most didactic films (despairing comedies such
as Meet John Doe, in which the hero considers suicide)
allowed working-class audiences to imagine a better America.
And most screwballs weren't nearly so upfront about their politics.
Socially conscious subtext aside, they mostly offered simple
pleasures. Still, one can't divorce the films from their context.
Though they were about wish fulfillment, they were engaged with
what was going on in their world.
Little wonder, then, that the genre mutated in the 1940s,
after the Depression was over. Except for Capra, whose films
became even more overtly political, filmmakers began playing
with the screwball formula, at times subverting it. According
to University of Texas film historian Thomas Schatz in his 1981
book Hollywood Genres, by the 1950s the movies began to
reflect more complacent times, giving way eventually to situation
comedies.
The recent screwball film that grapples most courageously
and successfully with its times probably is 1998's Bulworth.
Unapologetically ideological, it confronts hypocrisy and political
cowardice head on and ends with an interracial, intergenerational
coupling (between Beatty and Halle Berry) every bit as unlikely
as the one Rock's movie declined to show.
Bulworth has problems, not least of which is the objectionable
way Beatty's character morphs into a great white savior of the
oppressed, but no one can deny that the movie, in the tradition
of Capra's most hard-edged work, is engaged in a dialogue about
its times.
Some movies, such as The Mexican and There's Something
About Mary, try to shake things up by laying a hip veneer
over a screwball plot or by combining the genre with other elements.
The Mexican doesn't do this nearly as successfully as
1996's Flirting With Disaster, which it resembles in tone.
Both movies share an air of unpredictability, but The Mexican
can be jarring in its
juxtapositions. And it seems to have confounded reviewers, who
have criticized it
primarily on the dubious grounds of being neither as romantic
nor as antic as they
expected.
Both Flirting With Disaster and Mary have one
thing in common besides a screwball heart: the presence of Stiller.
As unlikely as it seems, the actor is shaping up as his generation's
answer to Jimmy Stewart, doing consistently stellar work as a
decent bumbler who lucks onto love.
In addition to Meet the Parents, Stiller starred last
year in Keeping the Faith, with Edward Norton and Jenna
Elfman. Set in a New York City that is a true melting pot, Keeping
the Faith substitutes issues of ethnicity, culture and religion
for the genre's traditional concern with class. It is one of
the few new screwballs that really is about the way we live today.
What Stiller brings to the table that older romantic-comedy
leads such as Tom Hanks and Billy Crystal don't is edge. Short
of stature, with huge ears and a shadowy, hawklike gaze (perfect
comic counterpoint to Elfman, who resembles a lanky bunny), Stiller
comes off, nervously, as a perpetual urban outsider in the land
of white breads.
Urban-rural conflict often was present in 1930s screwball
comedies, along with class, gender and generational conflict.
In today's world, Stiller is the perfect embodiment.
It probably was the success of movies such as When Harry
Met Sally in 1989 that turned the moribund screwball genre
into a Hollywood mainstay.
Now the makers of each new film have to decide how to position
it against the genre's venerable traditions.
For instance, Cage's The Family Man is watered-down
Capra. If you changed the fashions, it could've been made 70
years ago.
The Wedding Planner hews so closely to the screwball
formula that many reviewers dismissed it as predictable and boring.
Tellingly, though, it deviates from formula in one important
way. The classic screwball movie celebrates the little guy. Rich
people usually are selfish and arrogant if not downright vile
(until, that is, they have a change of heart that makes the happy
ending possible).
But in The Wedding Planner, Lopez plays a successful,
assimilated immigrant (Italian) who rejects the childhood suitor
her father wants her to marry. She chooses a WASP doctor instead,
snatching him away from his rich blond (and perfectly nice) fiancee.
The film is so determined to ignore socioeconomic realities that
it never mentions that her Italian suitor apparently has no job
or prospects.
The movie pretends it isn't happening, but the already well-off
main character essentially rejects her roots to marry "up."
Presumedly, such a story line makes perfect sense to today's
upwardly mobile mainstream audiences. Much current popular music,
especially the hip-hop and R&B that appeal to Lopez's core
constituency, is obsessed with materialism. The Wedding Planner
updates the formula after all, though stealthily, in the
only way that really matters.
The 1998 movie You've Got Mail is another screwball
comedy that was "updated" by reversing the genre's
traditional social stance.
The film was adapted from an Ernst Lubitsch film, The Shop
Around the Corner, about an unlikely romance between two
clerks. That film was made in 1940 and was based on a Hungarian
play, which together might account for why its class conflicts
are less pronounced than those in comedies made during the Depression
era.
Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed You've Got Mail,
puts socioeconomic issues center stage, but she does it in a
way antithetical to the spirit of the classic comedies her movie
emulates.
Ryan plays the owner of a tiny bookstore that's being driven
out of business by a chain and its ruthless executive (Hanks).
Professionally, the two characters hate each other, but they've
been carrying on an anonymous online romance.
The film doesn't punish the executive for the heartless way
his company operates. It would be hypocritical if it did, since
the film is stuffed with product placements for corporations,
such as Starbucks, that operate similarly.
You've Got Mail left some viewers with an uneasy feeling
at the end. That's because Hanks' character drives Ryan's out
of business, but she falls in love with him anyway. And he's
never required to repent, perhaps because in today's world, such
behavior isn't as bad as it used to be.
-
|