Long Live the Rom-Com!

Why this writer is glad the movies have learned to love the romantic comedy again.

During the 1990s and 2000s, the romantic comedy was one of the staple genres of Hollywood. Stars like Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and Richard Gere became firmly associated with the genre and, speaking personally, it was one of my favorite types of movies, both at home and at the theater. What can I say? I’m a Pisces, and I absolutely love stories about love and about people finding their one true partner in life. 

Then, somewhere around the late 2000s and the early 2010s, the genre became yesterday’s news. There were a number of reasons for this, not the least of which was the fact that studios increasingly turned to such genres as the superhero film and away from other, smaller genres. TV seemed to be more than willing to pick up the slack, and while the genre’s fortunes declined at the multiplex they seemed to proliferate on television. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who was sad to see the romantic comedy slowly but surely displaced from its perch.

Don’t get me wrong, I like seeing a love story stretched out over an entire season–or three–as much as the next person, but there’s also something deeply satisfying about being able to sit down for an hour-and-a-half to two hours and see a couple meet, fall in love, have some difficulties, and then end up married, all while having a few laughs along the way. Maybe it’s the Pisces’ desire to escape from the real world, but sometimes all I really want is a nice little slice of escapism, preferably feature-length. 

Well, it certainly looks as if the feature-length rom-com has begun to make a return. Over the past year, we’ve been treated to a veritable feast of such films, including The Lost City (starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum), Marry Me (starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson), Ticket to Paradise (starring Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel), and Ticket to Paradise (starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney). As the casting reveals, part of the appeal of these film’s stems from nostalgia, and I’ll be the first to admit that it truly is nice to see such rom-com heavy hitters as Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, and Jennifer Lopez make a triumphant return to the genre, and not just because it’s refreshing to see Hollywood actually give women in their 50s a chance to flourish in romance. Even now, several decades into their careers, each of these women continues to exude that intangible star quality–we’ll call it charisma–that explains why they were in such high demand in both the 1990s and the 2000s.

To be sure, Ticket to Paradise and Shotgun Wedding have struggled a bit when it comes to critical praise, and both languish at 57% and 46%, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes. Even The Lost City, arguably the most critically-lauded of the recent rom-com revival, still managed to achieve a ranking only in the upper 70s. Time and again, when you read through the critical consensus–always a questionable barometer, but here we are–you find some mention of how predictable they are. To take just one example, Tommis Laffly of Roger Ebert bluntly called Ticket to Paradise “ frustratingly unexceptional.”

I always find this line of argument rather puzzling when applied to genre films. It seems to me that the whole point of romantic comedy is to be…predictable. Most people, including me, don’t watch this particular genre with an expectation that what the film we’re viewing is going to somehow subvert our expectations. We know, going in, that there’s going to be a meet-cute of one sort or another, or that our romantic leads are going to begin as enemies and slowly fall (or re-fall) in love with one another. We know there’s going to be some sort of crisis, and then it’s all going to end up okay in the end. The predictability is, for genres like the romantic comedy, part of the fun. Not everything has to be some sort of ironic take on an established formula, contrary to what so many of today’s most cantankerous film critics seem to think.

More importantly, it’s not as if any of these films are actively bad and, from my point of view at least, they’re actually quite good. All of them have undeniably charismatic pairings–Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, Julia Roberts and George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel–and, perhaps even more importantly, they’re just plain funny. Never once while watching these films was I bored, and that’s because, unlike so many other films of late, they clock in at under two hours. They know that they have a limited amount of time to get their stories off the ground and they make the most of it. 

I can’t help but wonder whether the root cause of the critical hostility toward the romantic comedy is just what one would expect, i.e. misogyny. After all, the romantic comedy is one of those genres that has long been dismissed by many because of its attention to such “feminine” interests as love and feelings and relationships. It’s thus very easy to dismiss because it’s not concerned with supposedly loftier and more serious concerns.  

I also suspect that the critical animus toward the genre can be in part attributed to the fact that so many romantic comedy films are going straight to streaming (sometimes, though not always, after a brief stint in theaters). Many film critics, whether they want to admit it or not, have always viewed television as cinema’s inferior sibling, and there seems to be something about streaming (perhaps the illusion of ephemerality?) which lends itself to a similar form of dismissal, even if the object in question is a film (in length if not in distribution format).

Regardless of whether or not the critics have much love for the genre, it does seem as if the romantic comedy will be around for a while, if for no other reason than that they seem to be doing just fine in terms of streaming numbers. It’s anyone’s guess just when the streaming bubble will burst and how much damage it will do when it does. For the moment, however, I’m more than happy to go along for the ride.