So hubby and I have been watching movies tonight. We rented I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry and Waitress. Chuck and Larry was better than I expected. Waitress on the other hand was something of a disappointment. WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOWING
Now, based on the previews and the brief summaries of this movie I read, I was expecting a love story. I knew Keri Russell’s character was married to a controlling, deadbeat husband and finds herself pregnant just when planning to leave him. Okay. I also knew the OBGYN was the love interest. So what I was expecting was that she finds the courage to leave the shmoe and find true love with the doctor. And that’s what it starts out looking like. Except the doctor is married! He is an otherwise nice guy, but he’s married. And she knows he’s married. And they have this affair. In the end, she has the baby, divorces her husband, breaks off the affair (after meeting his wife), and starts a new life with a windfall from one of the other characters. Now I’m not saying that a story about empowerment is bad–because I think that’s what this was supposed to be. But where is it written that empowered women have to be alone? That’s one of the things I love about Nora Roberts’ books. She empowers women and they have true love. If I’m a romantic, so be it, but I like a love story and I felt cheated by this movie because it wasn’t. There were funny things about it and this one very sexy scene where she and the doctor are baking pie in the kitchen. There’s something really sexy about a man in a kitchen. Is that just me? I should refine that by saying a man who knows what to do and not look completely inept in the kitchen. I’m sorry to say that my husband just makes a mess, which is decidedly not sexy. But anyway, I just really don’t understand why the doctor had to be married. I could get past her cheating on the abusive shmoe husband. But I couldn’t get past him being married and cheating on the innocent, trusting wife. That’s just a no no for me. Just my thoughts.
One thought on “Expectations of Romance”
I didn’t hate this movie, but probably because I went into it with no expectations. I picked it up in the video store this morning and it was a matter of well, this looks sort of like USA movie material and blah, but I’ve seen everything else worth seeing and I need something to keep me company, and there’s pie.
I did not expect romance by my stringent romance standards because just reading that she was married, nevermind what he was like, meant that it was not romance as we readers have come to understand it, and I knew in advance that I shouldn’t expect any other rules to be obeyed.
That said, I didn’t like it either, and it was a deeply flawed movie. She has this husband who has all the symptoms of an abuser, yet manages not to smack her around on camera. Now this was a housework movie for me, so I was more listening to it than watching it and maybe I missed stuff, but I didn’t get why she was sticking around, and I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who get drunk and do dumb things and if she’d left him, she wouldn’t have been around to make her own situation worse.
Then she gets involved with the doctor, who I was sure we were going to discover was a widower with a tragic history. Sadly no. I liked the interaction between the two of them up and into the beginning of the affair, how they were sort of awkward and didn’t get along, whatever. But then, he ends up treating her pretty much like the husband with the he-man you will come in and “see me” for all these “appointments” and she’s like yeah, ok. So she’s not growing throughout the script.
Then childbirth, with a side of large check, becomes the transformative magic that gives her a spine, and she dumps them both. Whatever.
I thought the movie had a lot of nice elements, and I didn’t hate it because it wasn’t a love story. But I wish people would send me their scripts before they go into production so I can point out these huge gaping holes for them.
Sometimes it would be so easy to fix things. Like The Invisible. Would it kill you to not screw up the end of your movie? Really? Have I said Whatever yet?