Marry me, marry me, marry me - say no
TIM: The romantic comedy was a mainstay of the commercial film marketplace for decades, stretching all the way back to the silent era, but in the 21st Century, the genre has taken a terrible beating. Theatrically-released romcoms have become quite a rare beast indeed, which is the first thing that makes the new Marry Me notable: it is an exceptionally pure version of the form, hitting all of the expected narrative beats with ritualistic solemnity and a deep commitment to providing the viewer with absolutely no surprises whatsoever. This is also, arguably, the last thing that makes Marry Me notable. Despite having what sounds on paper like a concept so high that it's in orbit, the film is extraordinarily sedate, taking its cues from one of its two leads, Owen Wilson, who hasn't been in full "aw shucks, I'm just some fella" mode this hard in an extremely long time.
We'll get to that concept in a moment, but first things first. Since my main emotional response to Marry Me was something along the lines of "that was a movie, all right. 24 frames per second and everything", I could probably breeze through this in short order, taking no more effort in the writing than to see how many synonyms for "drowsy" I could whip up. But that's no fun for you, and crucially, it's no fun for me. So it's my great pleasure to welcome one of the recent additions to the Alternate Ending family, Rioghnach Robinson, to discuss the movie with me; her thoughts are, at the very least, distinctly more, shall we say, committed than my own.
But first, about that high concept (which originates in a graphic novel based on a webcomic, if I understand correctly). "Marry Me" isn't just the title, it's a smash single by pop star Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez), in collaboration with her fiancé, pop star Bastian (Maluma), and it's the centerpiece of a full-scale media blitz designed to sell the couple's radiant love to the world, all leading up to a spectacular live performance where they're going to get married in front of millions of fans. Awkwardly, Kat learns that Bastian has been unfaithful to her, literally just seconds before being elevated to the top of a massive staircase in a massive wedding dress, looking like some kind of colossal neofuturist wedding cake topper. "Unfaithful" meaning, in this case, a very PG-rated make-out session, but it was with her very own assistant, so yeah, it seems like the kind of thing you'd rightfully consider reason for calling off the wedding. Which she does in stream-of-consciousness babbling, live on the internet, that leaves her fanbase terribly confused and very vocal on social media about that confusion. But one person in the audience gets it: Charlie Gilbert (Wilson), a middle-school math teacher who has somewhat recently gone through what seems to have been a rough divorce. He's only there because his tween daughter Lou (Chloe Coleman) and his aggressive friend and co-worker Parker (Sarah Silverman) have badgered him into it, and he's only holding a sign that says "Marry Me" since Parker shoved it on him while she was rummaging for something else, and this is all the coincidence it takes for Kat to woozily point at him, and say "yes" to his pseudo-proposal. One day and one media frenzy later, the two "newlyweds" decide, what the hell, let's ride this out and see what happens. At first, Charlie is basically just a prop in Kat's press conferences. Absolutely no points for correctly guessing what happens second.
So I do have thoughts, and not all of them are "huh? I'm sorry, I was sleeping", but I've prattled on and then some. So Rioghnach, why don't you take us into the fun part: pray tell, how much did you enjoy Marry Me?
RIOGHNACH: Great question, Tim! I enjoyed Marry Me about as much as I'd enjoy swallowing three consecutive quarts of maple syrup, an experience that would involve similar amounts of tooth-rotting sweetness and goopy formlessness. I enjoyed Marry Me the way you enjoy a story told by someone who remembers thirty percent of that story, who tries to patch the gaps by telling you helpful things such as "it was funny." I enjoyed Marry Me the way I enjoy averting my eyes when people embarrass themselves in public.
Honestly, I was shocked by my own reaction. I love romcoms! I love pop music, odd-couple relationships, and high-concept commercial fiction! I like Jennifer Lopez and harbor no ill will toward Owen Wilson! And the overwhelming consensus on Marry Me seems similar to your good-spirited "meh," Tim, if not even more on the positive side. But I was in full-on Grinch mode by the end of this thing, and I've been picking apart why ever since. There is, after all, a lot of this movie that I'd classify as "fine." I'd even call the first act very good, with its unspoken tension between the high stakes of Kat's over-publicized life and the grounded intimacy of "local teacher Charlie wants his daughter to think he's fun." The scene you describe with the neofuturist wedding dress had me downright revved up, especially coming off the high of the ridiculously catchy "Church," a kinetic dance performance that made me want to see Lopez perform live in concert.
But then the two characters get on-screen together, and Jesus Christ, all that potential disintegrates to dust. In terms of the plot, "by rote" would be overgenerous; "sleepwalking through a neural net's interpolation of seventy romcoms" would get you closer. Still, I could forgive a bland plot if there were payoff on the promise of the characters. Instead, we get anti-chemistry so potent that I began to imagine wild diversions where Kat or Charlie fall in love with literally anyone else onscreen. The two occupy the same space and exchange dialogue, sure, but Kat's reaction to Charlie exists in the mode of "mild curiosity," with Lopez emphasizing her character's post-breakup woundedness to the point that anything outside her emotional recovery seems dimmed. And Charlie's reaction to Kat is even more off-kilter. The screenplay leans so hard into his discomfort with her endlessly filmed life that he comes off as scathing toward her on a personal level. "I hate to interrupt an artist while she's juicing," he says while Kat is filming a commercial. A few scenes later, he's telling his daughter that everything between himself and Kat is staged, shallow, and meaningless, with nothing to suggest that he might secretly think or wish otherwise. When he and Kat are finally alone and Kat says she believes in marriage, he says, "Jesus, still? You've been married what, six times?" And then, when she tells him about a genuinely touching gift that her ex got for her, he reminds her of the cheating, and she seems almost crestfallen. At this point, we are halfway through the movie. I mean, for fuck's sake. You'd think, with Kat being essentially a pseudo-Beyonce, that Charlie might express anything like admiration or interest about her accomplishments, but no: he has to be badgered and bribed into being around her, reminded by others of her good qualities, until so late in the game that you wonder if he's just repeating what other people have expressed more genuinely a dozen times.
And it's not just the writing. It's where the camera places our focus. During one of their many press conferences, Kat gives an unexpectedly profound answer about life being nothing more than a sequence of moments you choose. Does the camera linger on Charlie, allow us to see him considering and respecting her words, realizing she's more than just the Instagram-glossy exterior he'd thought her to be? No. Same scene: Charlie is put on the spot when a reporter interrogates him about his previous marriage. Kat cuts in to save him with a clever quip. Does the camera allow us to see Charlie's gratitude in that moment, or Kat's increased understanding of the hurt this scheme opens Charlie up to? No. In terms of the dynamics between the two, the whole thing is filmed with the bland neutrality of a C-SPAN camera.
That's to my eye, anyway. As someone who knows little about editing or cinematography, I'd be very interested to hear your take on the movie's visual language, Tim. For instance, what in God's name is with that weird fish-eye lens that shows up every so often?
TIM: I will confess to a certain "imp of the perverse" motivation in asking you to join me for this conversation: I saw your Letterboxd review of Marry Me and I got very excited by how infuriated it made you. As you say, I have a pretty genial "meh" feeling towards it at the moment, but something about that very same feeling isn't sitting right with me; like, the whole time I was watching the film, it didn't feel like a real experience, like the whole thing was... I'm still not sure, really, which is the point. It comes across like a series of notecards on a board rather than a movie, and I feel sort of trapped into giving it a "sure, fine, you pass" grade, because all of those notecards are "correct" in some formulaic sense, but also I'm mildly angry at myself for not having a bigger problem with the problems. So I am sort of hoping to have you convince me to join you on the dark side.
Meanwhile, though, how about those fish-eye lenses? I don't think Marry Me goes as far with it as something like No Sudden Move, but there are a whole lot of shots where things get all bendy and distorted in a terrible way. Near the start, I think in the first scene set in Charlie's kitchen, there's a left-to-right pan where space seems to morph and melt around the center point, and it's 100% because there's a wide lens on the camera at that point. And when that happened, it threw me, but I also was ready to just right it off as me being too sensitive to that kind of thing, and, I mean, pans happen. Pans with wide-angle anamorphic lenses just look shitty. It's not worth getting up in arms about.
But then the wide-angle shots just keep piling up, and it is hideous. What's worse is that it's hideous to absolutely no purpose. This isn't a film dominated by group shots; it has like five characters we ever need to care about as individuals. And director Kat Coiro isn't ever going in for deep staging: when people are onscreen together, they're pretty much standing next to each other. And those are the two reasons you need wide lenses: more left to right space, and deeper focus. With neither of those as a real motivating factor, Marry Me has apparently just settled on all these wide lenses because, I guess, Coiro and cinematographer Florian Ballhaus think they look cool? (It's perhaps worth mentioning this capacity that Ballhaus, son of the legend Michael Ballhaus, has not yet shot a movie that I think was very much worth looking at).
I think that's clearly the worst thing about the film from a craft perspective (it is cut tolerably well for continuity, and given how the vast majority of modern Hollywood comedies are cut for shit, that counts as a triumph; I also think the costume designs are actively good). But I did want to emphasise something you point out about the script, which is Charlie's weirdly sullen, passive, reactive role in the story. Marry Me is depicting something extraordinary in the lives of these two people, and for a lot of the film, Charlie doesn't seem to think of it as anything other than a straightforward business arrangement. This is, to me, the great missed opportunity of the film: using its high concept to actually look at two people from different economic and social classes falling in love. It's not remotely surprising that a contemporary studio movie would fail to take a look at class dynamics, but surely there's something that could be done here with the tensions between Kat's lifestyle and Charlie's. And we sort of get that, in a really just excruciating sequence where he accuses her of being detached from life because she's got assistants. But that's not about the conflict between their lives, it's about him being a weird little moral scold. The film simply doesn't seem to have ever even thought about what it would actually cost someone like Charlie to fling himself into a world of constant media attention and huge sums of money flying around. And as you've pointed out, Kat seems so removed from the situation emotionally that I'm not even really sure what a theoretical version of her inner conflict and character arc would look like, let alone the one the film uses. As you suggest, her arc is mostly about feeling hurt by Bastian and recovering from that, which isn't by any means a bad character story, but it's not the one Marry Me is telling.
I've blown way past the word count I set for myself, and I haven't even touched on the devastating lack of chemistry between Lopez and Wilson; they come across as perfectly affable co-workers, but I never once believe that either of them is ever thinking with lust in their heart about what the other looks like naked, and that is, I think, a bare minimum requirement of a successful romcom. But now that I’ve done some crabbing of my own, I want to challenge you to say if there's anything past the first act that you think works (and I agree, the best material is all in the first act; that "Church" number you mention is just about the only place in the film where the shot choices actually seem to be motivated by capturing and shaping the movement of human beings onscreen in a way that makes it seem more exciting and vital to look at). As you point out, the consensus seems to rather like the film; I'm not honestly sure I can come up with a reason why beyond "because we're fucking starved for traditional romantic comedies", and that doesn't feel like it can cover all of it.
RIOGHNACH: That's a challenge! This answer will probably feel like a joke, but I'm serious: I liked the moments when phone screens are layered onto the shots, and we see social media users making snide comments about the events of the movie. I even laughed at one comment that says something like "What's up with his nose?" I swear I'm not just saying this because I thought the movie was ass, and some of these fictional commenters seem to agree. I honestly think this effect got across the feeling of nonstop bombardment when you live in the spotlight. The live reactions scrolling and scrolling, judging and judging, made me wonder what it must be like for millions of people to view your personal life as an invitation for their opinion. Especially if, like Charlie, you weren't on social media beforehand.
In other words, this device taps into the tension between different lifestyles that you mention, a tension that I agree is miserably neglected otherwise. I'm glad you brought up class tensions in particular, because sweet Christ, this movie certainly has no interest in bringing it up. Over and over, the script cheerily ignores class dynamics, substituting in petty individual judgments instead. Take Charlie dismissing commercials and publicity as shallow. I called his attitude "scathing" earlier, but mulling it a bit more, I thought, "Wait - of course a non-famous, non-rich person might see publicity as shallow." So why did it jar me? Why, as you so accurately describe, Tim, does he spend so much of the movie seeming like a weird little moral scold? I think it's the movie's bizarrely determined avoidance of the characters' circumstances. Charlie scorns publicity ops. Is that because he has to consider grounded issues like paying rent or budgeting, which would contrast starkly against Grammy nomination parties and day trips to London? No, nothing like that! He just thinks that a flashy lifestyle is shallow, because he's got personal tendencies to judge others, dislike technology, and self-isolate. His behavior doesn't come from the material reality that's so different from Kat's. It comes from personality quirks.
I think this is really what pissed me off about the movie, pushing me beyond just disappointment into actual ire, because it also ties into the problem of what class disparity looks like in the wild imaginations of these movie producers. Charlie lives in a trendy, loft-like 2-bedroom apartment with a massive living space featuring an indoor swing. To reiterate, he is a single father supporting his daughter on a public school salary in New York City. What, and I cannot stress this enough, the hell. It's not like we need to see Charlie and Lou grappling with real financial instability in a romcom, but it feels downright craven that the plot so aggressively avoids the gulf in the couple's circumstances. There are so many possibilities, too! So much potential is wasted by bending over backward to avoid engaging with money and its contingent emotions! Super-wealthy Kat could offer to splurge and bring them along on tour, which Lou might want but Charlie might feel uncomfortable with. Kat or someone around her could judge Charlie's everyday job to be unambitious and wound his pride. On the social-imbalance end, Charlie could carelessly mess up Kat's public image with a mistimed post, still failing to grasp the consequences of millions of people's hatred and judgment. Any number of plot points could have emphasized the odd-couple aspect, generating obstacles despite their personality attraction. Instead, Charlie's personality is the obstacle, and we get slack conversations, undernourished thematic detours about award shows, and blithely irrelevant subplots about Kat teaching Lou to dance to help with competitive math. Even typing that sentence has me at my wits' end.
Well, that challenge to name a positive thing spiraled quickly downward! I apologize, but only sort of. When you say you have an inner imp that wants me to drag you over to the dark side, I will try my damnedest. How'd I do?
TIM: You did well! I think you've gotten me to drop down from 3 stars to 2.5 stars. Which is the most important drop of all, because it's my Fresh/Rotten divide. So, thank you for your help.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to swing things back up towards positivity, I want to agree that I really liked the social media overlays. I'll meet your "not a joke compliment" with "not a joke comparison": it reminded me of what I liked best about Unfriended, the way it allows the viewer to seek out the important information in the shot and learn aspects about the story world without having to be told them in minute detail through dialogue. The film isn't really about the nature of fan culture and being constant in the public spotlight, but those little visual asides do a lot to bring that to the forefront and make it clear just how tough Kat's life actually is, since she never just gets to live it privately and go through her emotional crises in peace. And where is that for the rest of the movie? If the movie turns into the struggle to have a personal life as a public figure, it gives her a better character arc, and it gives Charlie any character arc at all. And I really do think the movie thinks it's doing that, but it's really not. So all of Charlie's complaints that could be very well-grounded in a healthy distrust of this kind of fishbowl-like existence (maybe that's why all the fish-eye lenses? I dunno), instead just come off as a grumpy old man who doesn't get the kids with their TikToks and their Instagrams. And look, I'm sympathetic to that form of grumpiness, but it's not good for Marry Me. Or for Charlie's interest as a character.
But I do want to wrap up on a positive note, or at least positive-er. So I'll say that, even though I don't think Lopez and Wilson sell me as a romantic couple, they both sell me as individuals, within what they have to work with. Lopez especially sells the character as a creative type, and that leads to some very solid original songs, and even the occasional musical number. She also does a good job of showing the process of how Kat gets over Bastian's painful betrayal and prepares to move on in life, which isn't completely to the film's benefit - it certainly smothers both the rom and com elements of the romcom - but does at least give it some heft as a character study.
And hey, we got ourselves a 25th anniversary Anaconda reunion without even asking for it. I’ll take that.
Any further thoughts? Last-minute complaints you want to register before we tell Marry Me "I'm sorry, I just don't think of you that way"?
RIOGHNACH: Well, if the newfound Rotten rating has enticed angry Marry Me fans to come here in rage, I take full blame. But I'd also like to hold up in my defense that I've read three romcoms in the past ten days and all three made me cry; I swear I'm not just some romcom-hater who scorns the genre for not being Parasite or whatever.
I'd also like to try and veer toward positivity with my last breaths! Your mention of the music made me remember that I also liked the movie's songs, pretty much without exception. They're actually some of the best pop-songs-within-a-movie I can recall at the moment, with none of that "generate some I-V-vi-IV chords, slap on some 808s, and call it a day" sheen at all. Considering that we see several of the songs played out to near-full length, that's not an insubstantial strength. I'll also jump onboard with the idea that Lopez and Wilson have their individual charms. I never blamed them for the movie's disinterest in, as you say, "the struggle to have a personal life as a public figure" - exactly the unifying arc I thought we were going to get, if you'd asked me during that shining first act.
The last thing I'll say is that if Marry Me kicks off a new age of high-profile romcoms that put the work in, I will apologize with genuine goodwill for ever having maligned it. I miss romcoms! I miss movies that are interested in relationships, specifically happy relationships, and the reasons why people desire each other and make each other feel whole. But until the romcommaissance comes, I'm off to rewatch—oh, I don't know, any number of Austen adaptations, or Easy A, or the first 85% of Crazy, Stupid, Love. Thanks so much for having me, Tim!
Tim's Rating:
Rioghnach's Rating:
We'll get to that concept in a moment, but first things first. Since my main emotional response to Marry Me was something along the lines of "that was a movie, all right. 24 frames per second and everything", I could probably breeze through this in short order, taking no more effort in the writing than to see how many synonyms for "drowsy" I could whip up. But that's no fun for you, and crucially, it's no fun for me. So it's my great pleasure to welcome one of the recent additions to the Alternate Ending family, Rioghnach Robinson, to discuss the movie with me; her thoughts are, at the very least, distinctly more, shall we say, committed than my own.
But first, about that high concept (which originates in a graphic novel based on a webcomic, if I understand correctly). "Marry Me" isn't just the title, it's a smash single by pop star Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez), in collaboration with her fiancé, pop star Bastian (Maluma), and it's the centerpiece of a full-scale media blitz designed to sell the couple's radiant love to the world, all leading up to a spectacular live performance where they're going to get married in front of millions of fans. Awkwardly, Kat learns that Bastian has been unfaithful to her, literally just seconds before being elevated to the top of a massive staircase in a massive wedding dress, looking like some kind of colossal neofuturist wedding cake topper. "Unfaithful" meaning, in this case, a very PG-rated make-out session, but it was with her very own assistant, so yeah, it seems like the kind of thing you'd rightfully consider reason for calling off the wedding. Which she does in stream-of-consciousness babbling, live on the internet, that leaves her fanbase terribly confused and very vocal on social media about that confusion. But one person in the audience gets it: Charlie Gilbert (Wilson), a middle-school math teacher who has somewhat recently gone through what seems to have been a rough divorce. He's only there because his tween daughter Lou (Chloe Coleman) and his aggressive friend and co-worker Parker (Sarah Silverman) have badgered him into it, and he's only holding a sign that says "Marry Me" since Parker shoved it on him while she was rummaging for something else, and this is all the coincidence it takes for Kat to woozily point at him, and say "yes" to his pseudo-proposal. One day and one media frenzy later, the two "newlyweds" decide, what the hell, let's ride this out and see what happens. At first, Charlie is basically just a prop in Kat's press conferences. Absolutely no points for correctly guessing what happens second.
So I do have thoughts, and not all of them are "huh? I'm sorry, I was sleeping", but I've prattled on and then some. So Rioghnach, why don't you take us into the fun part: pray tell, how much did you enjoy Marry Me?
RIOGHNACH: Great question, Tim! I enjoyed Marry Me about as much as I'd enjoy swallowing three consecutive quarts of maple syrup, an experience that would involve similar amounts of tooth-rotting sweetness and goopy formlessness. I enjoyed Marry Me the way you enjoy a story told by someone who remembers thirty percent of that story, who tries to patch the gaps by telling you helpful things such as "it was funny." I enjoyed Marry Me the way I enjoy averting my eyes when people embarrass themselves in public.
Honestly, I was shocked by my own reaction. I love romcoms! I love pop music, odd-couple relationships, and high-concept commercial fiction! I like Jennifer Lopez and harbor no ill will toward Owen Wilson! And the overwhelming consensus on Marry Me seems similar to your good-spirited "meh," Tim, if not even more on the positive side. But I was in full-on Grinch mode by the end of this thing, and I've been picking apart why ever since. There is, after all, a lot of this movie that I'd classify as "fine." I'd even call the first act very good, with its unspoken tension between the high stakes of Kat's over-publicized life and the grounded intimacy of "local teacher Charlie wants his daughter to think he's fun." The scene you describe with the neofuturist wedding dress had me downright revved up, especially coming off the high of the ridiculously catchy "Church," a kinetic dance performance that made me want to see Lopez perform live in concert.
But then the two characters get on-screen together, and Jesus Christ, all that potential disintegrates to dust. In terms of the plot, "by rote" would be overgenerous; "sleepwalking through a neural net's interpolation of seventy romcoms" would get you closer. Still, I could forgive a bland plot if there were payoff on the promise of the characters. Instead, we get anti-chemistry so potent that I began to imagine wild diversions where Kat or Charlie fall in love with literally anyone else onscreen. The two occupy the same space and exchange dialogue, sure, but Kat's reaction to Charlie exists in the mode of "mild curiosity," with Lopez emphasizing her character's post-breakup woundedness to the point that anything outside her emotional recovery seems dimmed. And Charlie's reaction to Kat is even more off-kilter. The screenplay leans so hard into his discomfort with her endlessly filmed life that he comes off as scathing toward her on a personal level. "I hate to interrupt an artist while she's juicing," he says while Kat is filming a commercial. A few scenes later, he's telling his daughter that everything between himself and Kat is staged, shallow, and meaningless, with nothing to suggest that he might secretly think or wish otherwise. When he and Kat are finally alone and Kat says she believes in marriage, he says, "Jesus, still? You've been married what, six times?" And then, when she tells him about a genuinely touching gift that her ex got for her, he reminds her of the cheating, and she seems almost crestfallen. At this point, we are halfway through the movie. I mean, for fuck's sake. You'd think, with Kat being essentially a pseudo-Beyonce, that Charlie might express anything like admiration or interest about her accomplishments, but no: he has to be badgered and bribed into being around her, reminded by others of her good qualities, until so late in the game that you wonder if he's just repeating what other people have expressed more genuinely a dozen times.
And it's not just the writing. It's where the camera places our focus. During one of their many press conferences, Kat gives an unexpectedly profound answer about life being nothing more than a sequence of moments you choose. Does the camera linger on Charlie, allow us to see him considering and respecting her words, realizing she's more than just the Instagram-glossy exterior he'd thought her to be? No. Same scene: Charlie is put on the spot when a reporter interrogates him about his previous marriage. Kat cuts in to save him with a clever quip. Does the camera allow us to see Charlie's gratitude in that moment, or Kat's increased understanding of the hurt this scheme opens Charlie up to? No. In terms of the dynamics between the two, the whole thing is filmed with the bland neutrality of a C-SPAN camera.
That's to my eye, anyway. As someone who knows little about editing or cinematography, I'd be very interested to hear your take on the movie's visual language, Tim. For instance, what in God's name is with that weird fish-eye lens that shows up every so often?
TIM: I will confess to a certain "imp of the perverse" motivation in asking you to join me for this conversation: I saw your Letterboxd review of Marry Me and I got very excited by how infuriated it made you. As you say, I have a pretty genial "meh" feeling towards it at the moment, but something about that very same feeling isn't sitting right with me; like, the whole time I was watching the film, it didn't feel like a real experience, like the whole thing was... I'm still not sure, really, which is the point. It comes across like a series of notecards on a board rather than a movie, and I feel sort of trapped into giving it a "sure, fine, you pass" grade, because all of those notecards are "correct" in some formulaic sense, but also I'm mildly angry at myself for not having a bigger problem with the problems. So I am sort of hoping to have you convince me to join you on the dark side.
Meanwhile, though, how about those fish-eye lenses? I don't think Marry Me goes as far with it as something like No Sudden Move, but there are a whole lot of shots where things get all bendy and distorted in a terrible way. Near the start, I think in the first scene set in Charlie's kitchen, there's a left-to-right pan where space seems to morph and melt around the center point, and it's 100% because there's a wide lens on the camera at that point. And when that happened, it threw me, but I also was ready to just right it off as me being too sensitive to that kind of thing, and, I mean, pans happen. Pans with wide-angle anamorphic lenses just look shitty. It's not worth getting up in arms about.
But then the wide-angle shots just keep piling up, and it is hideous. What's worse is that it's hideous to absolutely no purpose. This isn't a film dominated by group shots; it has like five characters we ever need to care about as individuals. And director Kat Coiro isn't ever going in for deep staging: when people are onscreen together, they're pretty much standing next to each other. And those are the two reasons you need wide lenses: more left to right space, and deeper focus. With neither of those as a real motivating factor, Marry Me has apparently just settled on all these wide lenses because, I guess, Coiro and cinematographer Florian Ballhaus think they look cool? (It's perhaps worth mentioning this capacity that Ballhaus, son of the legend Michael Ballhaus, has not yet shot a movie that I think was very much worth looking at).
I think that's clearly the worst thing about the film from a craft perspective (it is cut tolerably well for continuity, and given how the vast majority of modern Hollywood comedies are cut for shit, that counts as a triumph; I also think the costume designs are actively good). But I did want to emphasise something you point out about the script, which is Charlie's weirdly sullen, passive, reactive role in the story. Marry Me is depicting something extraordinary in the lives of these two people, and for a lot of the film, Charlie doesn't seem to think of it as anything other than a straightforward business arrangement. This is, to me, the great missed opportunity of the film: using its high concept to actually look at two people from different economic and social classes falling in love. It's not remotely surprising that a contemporary studio movie would fail to take a look at class dynamics, but surely there's something that could be done here with the tensions between Kat's lifestyle and Charlie's. And we sort of get that, in a really just excruciating sequence where he accuses her of being detached from life because she's got assistants. But that's not about the conflict between their lives, it's about him being a weird little moral scold. The film simply doesn't seem to have ever even thought about what it would actually cost someone like Charlie to fling himself into a world of constant media attention and huge sums of money flying around. And as you've pointed out, Kat seems so removed from the situation emotionally that I'm not even really sure what a theoretical version of her inner conflict and character arc would look like, let alone the one the film uses. As you suggest, her arc is mostly about feeling hurt by Bastian and recovering from that, which isn't by any means a bad character story, but it's not the one Marry Me is telling.
I've blown way past the word count I set for myself, and I haven't even touched on the devastating lack of chemistry between Lopez and Wilson; they come across as perfectly affable co-workers, but I never once believe that either of them is ever thinking with lust in their heart about what the other looks like naked, and that is, I think, a bare minimum requirement of a successful romcom. But now that I’ve done some crabbing of my own, I want to challenge you to say if there's anything past the first act that you think works (and I agree, the best material is all in the first act; that "Church" number you mention is just about the only place in the film where the shot choices actually seem to be motivated by capturing and shaping the movement of human beings onscreen in a way that makes it seem more exciting and vital to look at). As you point out, the consensus seems to rather like the film; I'm not honestly sure I can come up with a reason why beyond "because we're fucking starved for traditional romantic comedies", and that doesn't feel like it can cover all of it.
RIOGHNACH: That's a challenge! This answer will probably feel like a joke, but I'm serious: I liked the moments when phone screens are layered onto the shots, and we see social media users making snide comments about the events of the movie. I even laughed at one comment that says something like "What's up with his nose?" I swear I'm not just saying this because I thought the movie was ass, and some of these fictional commenters seem to agree. I honestly think this effect got across the feeling of nonstop bombardment when you live in the spotlight. The live reactions scrolling and scrolling, judging and judging, made me wonder what it must be like for millions of people to view your personal life as an invitation for their opinion. Especially if, like Charlie, you weren't on social media beforehand.
In other words, this device taps into the tension between different lifestyles that you mention, a tension that I agree is miserably neglected otherwise. I'm glad you brought up class tensions in particular, because sweet Christ, this movie certainly has no interest in bringing it up. Over and over, the script cheerily ignores class dynamics, substituting in petty individual judgments instead. Take Charlie dismissing commercials and publicity as shallow. I called his attitude "scathing" earlier, but mulling it a bit more, I thought, "Wait - of course a non-famous, non-rich person might see publicity as shallow." So why did it jar me? Why, as you so accurately describe, Tim, does he spend so much of the movie seeming like a weird little moral scold? I think it's the movie's bizarrely determined avoidance of the characters' circumstances. Charlie scorns publicity ops. Is that because he has to consider grounded issues like paying rent or budgeting, which would contrast starkly against Grammy nomination parties and day trips to London? No, nothing like that! He just thinks that a flashy lifestyle is shallow, because he's got personal tendencies to judge others, dislike technology, and self-isolate. His behavior doesn't come from the material reality that's so different from Kat's. It comes from personality quirks.
I think this is really what pissed me off about the movie, pushing me beyond just disappointment into actual ire, because it also ties into the problem of what class disparity looks like in the wild imaginations of these movie producers. Charlie lives in a trendy, loft-like 2-bedroom apartment with a massive living space featuring an indoor swing. To reiterate, he is a single father supporting his daughter on a public school salary in New York City. What, and I cannot stress this enough, the hell. It's not like we need to see Charlie and Lou grappling with real financial instability in a romcom, but it feels downright craven that the plot so aggressively avoids the gulf in the couple's circumstances. There are so many possibilities, too! So much potential is wasted by bending over backward to avoid engaging with money and its contingent emotions! Super-wealthy Kat could offer to splurge and bring them along on tour, which Lou might want but Charlie might feel uncomfortable with. Kat or someone around her could judge Charlie's everyday job to be unambitious and wound his pride. On the social-imbalance end, Charlie could carelessly mess up Kat's public image with a mistimed post, still failing to grasp the consequences of millions of people's hatred and judgment. Any number of plot points could have emphasized the odd-couple aspect, generating obstacles despite their personality attraction. Instead, Charlie's personality is the obstacle, and we get slack conversations, undernourished thematic detours about award shows, and blithely irrelevant subplots about Kat teaching Lou to dance to help with competitive math. Even typing that sentence has me at my wits' end.
Well, that challenge to name a positive thing spiraled quickly downward! I apologize, but only sort of. When you say you have an inner imp that wants me to drag you over to the dark side, I will try my damnedest. How'd I do?
TIM: You did well! I think you've gotten me to drop down from 3 stars to 2.5 stars. Which is the most important drop of all, because it's my Fresh/Rotten divide. So, thank you for your help.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to swing things back up towards positivity, I want to agree that I really liked the social media overlays. I'll meet your "not a joke compliment" with "not a joke comparison": it reminded me of what I liked best about Unfriended, the way it allows the viewer to seek out the important information in the shot and learn aspects about the story world without having to be told them in minute detail through dialogue. The film isn't really about the nature of fan culture and being constant in the public spotlight, but those little visual asides do a lot to bring that to the forefront and make it clear just how tough Kat's life actually is, since she never just gets to live it privately and go through her emotional crises in peace. And where is that for the rest of the movie? If the movie turns into the struggle to have a personal life as a public figure, it gives her a better character arc, and it gives Charlie any character arc at all. And I really do think the movie thinks it's doing that, but it's really not. So all of Charlie's complaints that could be very well-grounded in a healthy distrust of this kind of fishbowl-like existence (maybe that's why all the fish-eye lenses? I dunno), instead just come off as a grumpy old man who doesn't get the kids with their TikToks and their Instagrams. And look, I'm sympathetic to that form of grumpiness, but it's not good for Marry Me. Or for Charlie's interest as a character.
But I do want to wrap up on a positive note, or at least positive-er. So I'll say that, even though I don't think Lopez and Wilson sell me as a romantic couple, they both sell me as individuals, within what they have to work with. Lopez especially sells the character as a creative type, and that leads to some very solid original songs, and even the occasional musical number. She also does a good job of showing the process of how Kat gets over Bastian's painful betrayal and prepares to move on in life, which isn't completely to the film's benefit - it certainly smothers both the rom and com elements of the romcom - but does at least give it some heft as a character study.
And hey, we got ourselves a 25th anniversary Anaconda reunion without even asking for it. I’ll take that.
Any further thoughts? Last-minute complaints you want to register before we tell Marry Me "I'm sorry, I just don't think of you that way"?
RIOGHNACH: Well, if the newfound Rotten rating has enticed angry Marry Me fans to come here in rage, I take full blame. But I'd also like to hold up in my defense that I've read three romcoms in the past ten days and all three made me cry; I swear I'm not just some romcom-hater who scorns the genre for not being Parasite or whatever.
I'd also like to try and veer toward positivity with my last breaths! Your mention of the music made me remember that I also liked the movie's songs, pretty much without exception. They're actually some of the best pop-songs-within-a-movie I can recall at the moment, with none of that "generate some I-V-vi-IV chords, slap on some 808s, and call it a day" sheen at all. Considering that we see several of the songs played out to near-full length, that's not an insubstantial strength. I'll also jump onboard with the idea that Lopez and Wilson have their individual charms. I never blamed them for the movie's disinterest in, as you say, "the struggle to have a personal life as a public figure" - exactly the unifying arc I thought we were going to get, if you'd asked me during that shining first act.
The last thing I'll say is that if Marry Me kicks off a new age of high-profile romcoms that put the work in, I will apologize with genuine goodwill for ever having maligned it. I miss romcoms! I miss movies that are interested in relationships, specifically happy relationships, and the reasons why people desire each other and make each other feel whole. But until the romcommaissance comes, I'm off to rewatch—oh, I don't know, any number of Austen adaptations, or Easy A, or the first 85% of Crazy, Stupid, Love. Thanks so much for having me, Tim!
Tim's Rating:
Rioghnach's Rating:
Categories: comics and superheroes, love stories, romcoms
