Ask yourself this: are you really going to see Sweet Home Alabama? If not, then you won't mind the spoilers ahead, which probably won't matter since any sentient ape creature could probably surmise what happens at the end of the movie. As we walked into the theater, I said to Tessa, "You know how it ends, right?" and she said, "Of course!" and still we went, sat in our chairs, consumed popcorn, the whole bit. With today's film fare, the act of going to movies is truly a grudging celebration of the process, and not the goal.
Let's take this movie, for instance. The trailer tells you that Reese Witherspoon's character a successful fashion designer - is due to be married in New York to a swanky charmer with a politico mom, but Reese needs to go down to Alabama first to divorce what we call a "UEM" (Unfortunately Early Marriage – a term usually reserved for gay men, but we'll be generous with it here), who happens to be very good-looking, and the two fight with that Romantic Comedy Repartée.
Obviously, two things need to happen: fish-out-of-water wackiness, and a reunion with the old husband. The question is, how do you get there? Back in the pre-equivocation days of the early 90s, you'd make sure that the NYC groom is privately an asshole, bent on marrying a high-society baby machine. Or at the very least, you'd make New York itself an antagonist, full of soulless backstabbing and high fashion jealousy.
But this movie is trying to be "smart" by not giving us a proper bad guy; the NYC fianc is actually very sweet, and her life in the big city is rich with personal and financial success. The only drag is his mother (Candace Bergen) who is so rude and impolitic you wonder how the hell she ever became "mayor of New York City." The hometown, by the rules of old movies, should be sweet and full of barbecue, and god knows it is. But there's also something desolate about the place, something eerie and depressingly familiar, a bit like a Smiths song (or perhaps that's just my own take on my grade school homeland of Cedar Rapids, IA).
The curious thing about having no proper antagonist is that what it makes up for in subtlety, it loses in tension. You don't really care where she ends up, because they both seem basically okay. Not to be a chick movie aficionado, but at the end of "When Harry Met Sally," you really want them to be together, and here, you can take it or leave it.
But there's something more disturbing afoot here. The mayfly-like attention span of American audiences have pretty much eradicated a slow-burning plot, which means that we are forever stuck with romantic comedies that give us zero indication of why our two lovers should be together. In "Sweet Home Alabama" and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (both of which we've seen this week), I had no fucking idea why any of these people should be with each other. In "Greek Wedding," a tiny montage of them in the car is supposed to make up for months of genuine affection; in "Alabama," you know that Reese and her redneck boyfriend should be together because they can't get along. Ask yourself this second question: when was the last time you really wanted two movie lovers to be together?
And yet, both movies are huge hits. I told Tessa that it was probably America's desire to be utterly unchallenged by their entertainment, but it's more: they are both very inward-thinking, don't-stray-too-far-from-home stories about women whose entire lives are consumed by their ability to marry. In the movie world, that's fine, as it's all very filmic - but a generation of young girls watching these films kinda makes me sick. You can't help but think these flicks suggest that having a career is fine, but only if their waking moments are spent dreaming of another blind step down the easy path of numbing domestication.
Posted by at October 9, 2002 8:59 PM