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Isn't It Romantic
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Rebel Wilson is a curious screen phenomenon. Large,
Aussie, vulgar and forthright, she deflates every idealistic sentiment in her
vicinity with somewhat less than witty retorts like “That’s dumb” and “Love is
shit”. So far in her films, she has been given little (shall we say)
characterological bandwidth in which to grow or develop as a persona; there’s
not much space between comedy and drama for her to work with. Her roles, as
written, often have a clearly hard time manoeuvring her into a
true-love-conquers-all conclusion; even the otherwise excellent comedy Bridesmaids (2011) gives evidence of
that. Isn’t It Romantic (it’s the
movie that omits the question mark at the end, not me), touted as Wilson’s
“first solo lead role”, contrives a laborious meta-film conceit to take Rebel
all the way from disenchantment to re-enchantment.
The only time Wilson breaks out of her general movie-given
arc on screen – and these opportunities are precious – is when the film in
question flips into exuberant singing-and-dancing sequences (where she can show
off her best talents), of which Isn’t It
Romantic has exactly two. It has been that way for Wilson ever since her
success in the Pitch Perfect film
series (2012-2017) – where, take note, she at first played a late-teenager,
even though in reality she was already well into her 30s.
Finding the pretexts for such sequences is the big
challenge facing contemporary Hollywood musical comedies. The number, it seems,
has to be either semi-credibly performance-based – putting on a show as in the Pitch Perfect films or TV’s Glee (2009-2015), rocking a karaoke
night with friends – or a fantasy excursion (dream sequence, hallucination,
reverie, etc). It can’t just be,
outrightly, a full-blooded, irreal musical. This, too, ends up being a
constriction on Wilson’s development as a performer and a personality.
Isn’t It Romantic starts in – where
else? – Australia, as little Natalie learns from her hardbitten Mum not to fall
for that romantic Pretty Woman/knightly
male saviour crap. Then, in the blink of an ellipse, she’s all grown up and
trying to make her way in a New York architectural firm (her geographical move
making no sense beyond the fact that it mirrors Wilson’s own relocation within
Planet Showbiz, Crocodile Dundee-style). In the office –
after the now obligatory comic-underlining of gendered disparities and daily
humiliations – we are introduced to Natalie’s rom-com-obsessed assistant,
Whitney (Betty Gilpin from TV’s GLOW),
and a gormless guy, Josh (Adam DeVine), who likes Natalie in a
romantically-hopeful way, but is often thoughtlessly rejected by her.
Swinging into the post-exposition “knock on the head”
device – wielded much more craftily in Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein’s I Feel Pretty (2018), the most obvious
immediate predecessor to this film – Natalie enters the unreal world of a
generic romantic comedy (the standard elements of which have been
heavy-handedly laid out for us, at length, in previous Natalie/Whitney dialogue
– as if some spectators likely to be lost without such a tip-sheet really exist
in the target audience). This is a “metaleptic” premise copying I Feel Pretty on the level of the
heroine suddenly being beautiful and adorable to all she meets, but actually
wavering off-track fairly quickly into the fuzzier, make-‘em-up-as-you-go rules
of Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), one of the first American films to popularise such conceptual conceits.
(Brian Henderson diagnosed this level of Allen’s movie well in his Film Quarterly review of 1986).
On its semantic switchboard, Isn’t It Romantic then spends most of its time sorting out the
mismatched pairs of Natalie & Josh, and Blake (Liam Hemsworth, another
Aussie) & Isabella (Indian star Priyanka Chopra). That’s not much of a
nutcracker – indeed, one of the most strangely satisfying moments of
plainspeaking in the film comes when Natalie, standing as part of this
foursome, eyeballs everyone and drawls: “Hey, maybe we should just swap
partners”. But the film, alas, cannot end right there. It gets itself into an
awkward dance: trying to “do” rom-com while simultaneously satirising its
moves. But that necessarily means satirising its character-types (such as best
friend, etc); and director Todd Strauss-Schulson, with his three scriptwriters,
seems to be holding out for some vital, working distinction between the
individual characters and the types they incarnate. But nothing can, for
instance, save the figure of Josh from being a plain, one-dimensional bore.
Back to the metalepsis: Natalie figures she’s going to
have to get to the end of the sappy, affirming-love story in order to exit from
it. (She also realises – it’s a gag repeated into the ground – that in this
sanitised “PG world” she’s not going to get any sex-action, although off-screen
she somehow “sneaks a peek” at Blake’s junk.) But getting it on with Blake
achieves nothing – in fact, later, in a clumsy POV switch, she will realise that
he’s just the same old patriarchal louse as he was in the initial reality,
stealing her architectural ideas – and even busting in on the wedding of Josh
with Isabella doesn’t resolve the problem. Ah yes, she’s got to learn to love herself – this, after her gay mate,
Donny (Brandon Scott Jones), has just spelt it out for her in the previous
scene.
This loving-oneself business – apart from being ubiquitous
in post-“The Greatest Love of All” pop culture! – is also a nod to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015-2019), the
other key intertext at work in Isn’t It
Romantic (the karaoke trigger arises in both, for example). Just as that
series sidestepped all possible romantic-coupling destinies (including the
queer one it had been hinting at all along) in its final episode, in order to
affirm radical self-esteem, Isn’t It
Romantic frantically juggles its balls in the air to declare that, back in
World One, Natalie will more or less magically win everything she wants, after
all, if only she can value herself. This leads to a final cap-off in which
Whitney observes that, in a real sense, Natalie does live out a romantic comedy – to which the heroine replies
that, if that were the case, she would surely, at this point, burst into song
and dance … and then Madonna’s “Express Yourself” is performed with zest by the
entire cast out on the New York street.
This is rather like the odd meta-twist that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend took at the very
last, with Rebecca (Rachel Bloom) being exhorted by Paula
(Donna Lynne Champlin) to turn away from the dreams of romance and write those
songs that are “in her head” all the time whenever she gazed off dreamily –
even though very many of the songs across the show’s four seasons didn’t happen
in her head at all (or even included her!). At that moment, a great series
pulled back from something truly avant-garde and Utopian. Similarly, Isn’t It Romantic’s fantasy coda can
only happen at the very edge of the story, as the credits are about to roll and
the representational layer is thinner than ever, evaporating as the punters
march out (of the theatre) or switch off (their TV sets or computers). These
glimmers of good things vanish too quickly …
MORE Strauss-Schulson: The Final Girls © Adrian Martin 25 May 2019 |
