Benjamin, an ad executive, is trying to land a big account, only his boss thinks that it needs a feminine touch, so he considers giving it to a couple of female execs. Benjamin makes a wager with them that if he can get a woman to fall in love with him he gets the account. He lets the female execs choose the girl. They choose Andie, a writer for Composure magazine whom they had met earlier and learned she is doing an article called "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days". Knowing that she's going to be impossible, they don't tell him that. Ben tries his best to woo her while she does her best to drive him away.
Andie and Ben's objectives may be unethical, but How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is grounded in a sense of lightheartedness that make their questionable actions easy to look past, due in no small part to the chemistry between actors Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey.
I personally believe that How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days set the tone for the rest of the 2000s rom-com movies, as it not only starred popular actors but also used the storyline of enemies to lovers, with a fun twist. It didn't show a power inbalance, but instead a fun story with both characters as equals.
Netflix's new movie Set It Up is being touted as the return of the rom-com, though it's not like we've really been suffering from a dearth (see: How to Be Single, Sleeping With Other People, Home Again, Trainwreck and several others in the past few years).
But the film does indeed feel like a return — perhaps more accurately a return to form — and it's because Set It Up, directed by Claire Scanlon (whose TV directorial work includes Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and written by Katie Silberman, so unabashedly follows the formula of the genre's contemporary hey-day. This latest iteration involves that bickering-friends-turned-lovers trope familiar from Meg Ryan movies (You've Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally); the matchmaking element from Clueless and The Parent Trap; and a lovably nerdy female protagonist reminiscent of Josie Geller (Never Been Kissed) and Laney Boggs (She's All That).
While so many recent renditions of the rom-com have tried to upgrade the genre — usually by going the raunchy route — Set It Up feels so purposefully classic and familiar that it plays right into that nostalgic feel-good spot.
But this walk down memory lane is a bit more 2018-conscious, as illustrated by the casting of Taye Diggs and Lucy Liu as bosses — roles typically given to white actors. Their love story is one part of the romantic romp, but the orchestrators behind their not-so-organic “meet-cute,” Harper (Zoey Deutch) and Charlie (Glen Powell), form the real heart of the story. They're two overworked and underpaid assistants working for big-time ESPN reporter Kirsten (Liu) and top-dog businessman Rick (Diggs), respectively.
Though they belong in different industries, they happen to all share the same building, and after one fateful late night at the office, the two assistants meet, get into a fight, then concoct a plan to set up their bosses. (Funnily enough, when one of the characters literally says “set it up” in the movie, it does not refer to this setup.) The two assistants reason that if their bosses are preoccupied with each other (read: getting laid), they'll be way easier on their employees, giving them more free time to pursue their own dreams — or just take a much-needed nap.
Harper wants to be a writer herself, but is frustrated by her stunted ambition and the lack of breathing room from her demanding job; her hectic schedule has also prevented her from getting a date in years. Charlie, on the other hand, has his eyes on a promotion that he believes is just around the corner, in part to please his materialistic, status-chasing girlfriend (Joan Smalls). They come into the plan with high expectations, but what they didn't expect was their mutual desire to spend more time with each other — and not just while tricking their bosses.
The Parent Trap-like plan produces some of the film's funniest scenes, including an elevator shutdown coordinated by Harper and Charlie with the help of a maintenance worker (a hilarious cameo from Kimmy Schmidt's Tituss Burgess). Then there's a forced kiss-cam situation at a baseball game that accelerates their first smooch.
Silberman's script is so jam-packed with jokes that the hilarity of the characters' banter — especially between the motor-mouthed Deutch and the eye-rolling Powell — will get you on a romantic high. Diggs and Liu are given more outlandish roles — the former is a laptop-thrower, the latter is described as the spawn of Miss Piggy and Voldemort but with low blood sugar — so there's a bit of whiplash when we're given a glimpse into their empathetic sides, but these two are exhilarating to watch nonetheless.
Set It Up reaches so far for the highs that it neglects some of the potentially meatier plotlines and backstories. What do Harper and Charlie's situations say about the millennial work culture, for instance? Then there's the gay BFF character to Charlie, but with the unfortunate casting of Pete Davidson (who is neither funny nor charismatic here), this addition feels like a misstep for a movie that has such good representation.
Set It Up is mostly predictable in the best sense: There's timeless enjoyment in watching two people butt heads with each other and then eventually fall in love. If big studios aren't turning out romantic comedies like they used to, perhaps original content streaming services like Netflix will prove to be the saving grace for a particular category of movies people crave — even if they require a little 21st century facelift.
Three of my good female friends, who I could usually find overcoming hangovers at their Saturday morning "Recovery Drunches" at Oxford's Pub, once made pinpricks in their thumbs and performed a ceremony becoming blood sisters. They were the only people I have actually known who could inspire a Judd Apatow buddy movie, and all three could do what not all women do well, and that is perfectly tell a dirty joke.
Maybe I liked "Bridesmaids" in their honor. Paul Feig's new comedy, written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, is about a group of women friends who are as unbehaved as the guys in "The Hangover." Don't tell me "unbehaved" isn't a word. It is now. And Wiig is rather brilliant in her physical comedy as she flies to Vegas as part of her BFF's bachelorette party; if it were not the wedding of her BFF, this trip would get her thrown out of the wedding. Her motto: "What happens in Vegas, starts on the plane."
Wiig plays Annie, whose Milwaukee bakery shop has just gone bust, who rooms with a surpassingly peculiar British brother and sister, and whose longtime friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), is getting married. Naturally, she expects to be maid of honor, but begins to fear a rival in Helen (Rose Byrne), the rich and overconfident trophy wife of the groom's boss. You see that can lead to trouble.
Helen is one of those people who at birth was placed in charge of everything for everyone. It's not that she's trying to steal Annie's thunder, it's just that she can't comprehend that she isn't running the wedding. This leads finally to Annie's explosion at a bizarre French-themed bridal shower with an item of pastry that would strike even an editor of the Guinness Book of World Records as, well, excessive.
The movie does a good job of introducing a large cast and in particular keeping all the members of the bridal party in play. They include Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey), a mother of three adolescent sons ("My house is covered in semen"), and (my favorite) Megan (Melissa McCarthy), who has the sturdiness and the certainty of a fireplug.
Did I mention the movie was produced by Apatow? Love him or not, he's consistently involved with movies that connect with audiences, and "Bridesmaids" seems to be a more or less deliberate attempt to cross the Chick Flick with the Raunch Comedy. It definitively proves that women are the equal of men in vulgarity, sexual frankness, lust, vulnerability, overdrinking and insecurity. And it moves into areas not available to men, for example the scene when they're all trying on dresses at a bridal shop and the lunch they've just shared suddenly reappears, if you get my drift.
Not everybody can do physical comedy. Wiig's behavior on the flight to Vegas would win the respect of Lucille Ball. I don't even want to start describing what happens. In these day when you can get arrested on a plane for taking out your car keys, her behavior is a throwback to the good old days of airborne slapstick.
Yet the movie has a heart. It heals some wounds, restores some hurt feelings, confesses some secrets, and in general, ends happily, which is just as well, because although there are many things audiences will accept from women in a comedy, ending miserably is not one of them. That may be sexist, but there you are.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Everybody knows the first sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. But the chapter ends with a truth equally acknowledged about Mrs. Bennet, who has five daughters in want of husbands: "The business of her life was to get her daughters married."
Romance seems so urgent and delightful in Austen because marriage is a business, and her characters cannot help treating it as a pleasure. Pride and Prejudice is the best of her novels because its romance involves two people who were born to be in love, and care not about business, pleasure, or each other. It is frustrating enough when one person refuses to fall in love, but when both refuse, we cannot rest until they kiss.
Of course all depends on who the people are. When Dorothea marries the Rev. Casaubon in Eliot's Middlemarch, it is a tragedy. She marries out of consideration and respect, which is all wrong; she should have married for money, always remembering that where money is, love often follows, since there is so much time for it. The crucial information about Mr. Bingley, the new neighbor of the Bennet family, is that he "has" an income of four or five thousand pounds a year. One never earns an income in these stories, one has it, and Mrs. Bennet (Brenda Blethyn) has her sights on it.
Her candidate for Mr. Bingley's hand is her eldest daughter, Jane; it is orderly to marry the girls off in sequence, avoiding the impression that an older one has been passed over. There is a dance, to which Bingley brings his friend Darcy. Jane and Bingley immediately fall in love, to get them out of the way of Darcy and Elizabeth, who is the second Bennet daughter. These two immediately dislike each other. Darcy is overheard telling his friend Bingley that Elizabeth is "tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me." The person who overhears him is Elizabeth, who decides she will "loathe him for all eternity." She is advised within the family circle to count her blessings: "If he liked you, you'd have to talk to him."
These are the opening moves in Joe Wright's new film "Pride & Prejudice," one of the most delightful and heartwarming adaptations made from Austen or anybody else. Much of the delight and most of the heart comes from Keira Knightley, who plays Elizabeth as a girl glowing in the first light of perfection. She is beautiful, she has opinions, she is kind but can be unforgiving. "They are all silly and ignorant like other girls," says her father in the novel, "but Lizzie has something more of quickness than her sisters."
Knightley's performance is so light and yet fierce that she makes the story almost realistic; this is not a well-mannered "Masterpiece Theatre" but a film where strong-willed young people enter life with their minds at war with their hearts. The movie is more robust than most period romances; it is set earlier than usual, in the late 1700s, a period more down to earth than the early Victorian years. The young ladies don't look quite so much like illustrations for Vanity Fair, and there is mud around their hems when they come back from a walk. It is a time of rural realities: When Mrs. Bennet sends a daughter to visit Netherfield Park, the country residence of Mr. Bingley, she sends her on horseback, knowing it will rain, and she will have to spend the night.
The plot by this point has grown complicated. It is a truth universally acknowledged by novelists that before two people can fall in love with each other, they must first seem determined to make the wrong marriage with someone else. It goes without saying that Lizzie fell in love with young Darcy (Matthew MacFadyen) the moment she saw him, but her pride has been wounded. She tells Jane: "I might more easily forgive his vanity had he not wounded mine."
The stakes grow higher. She is told by the dashing officer Wickham (Rupert Friend) that Darcy, his childhood friend, cheated him of a living that he deserved. And she believes that Darcy is responsible for having spirited Bingley off to London to keep him out of the hands of her sister Jane. Lizzie even begins to think she may be in love with Wickham. Certainly she is not in love with the Rev. Collins (Tom Hollander), who has a handsome living and would be Mrs. Bennet's choice for a match. When Collins proposes, the mother is in ecstasy, but Lizzie declines, and is supported by her father (Donald Sutherland), a man whose love for his girls outweighs his wife's financial planning.
All of these characters meet and circle each other at a ball in the village Assembly Hall, and the camera circles them. The sequence feels like one unbroken shot, and has the same elegance as Visconti's long single take as he follows the prince through the ballrooms in "The Leopard." We see the characters interacting, we see Lizzie avoiding Collins and enticing Darcy, we understand the politics of these romances, and we are swept up in the intoxication of the dance. In a later scene as Lizzie and Darcy dance together everyone else somehow vanishes (in their eyes, certainly), and they are left alone within the love they feel.
But a lot must happen before the happy ending, and I particularly admired a scene in the rain where Darcy and Lizzie have an angry argument. This argument serves two purposes: It clears up misunderstandings, and it allows both characters to see each other as the true and brave people they really are. It is not enough for them to love each other; they must also love the goodness in each other, and that is where the story's true emotion lies.
The movie is well cast from top to bottom; like many British films, it benefits from the genius of its supporting players. Judi Dench brings merciless truth-telling to her role as a society arbiter; Sutherland is deeply amusing as a man who lives surrounded by women and considers it a blessing and a fate, and as his wife Blethyn finds a balance between her character's mercenary and loving sides. She may seem unforgivably obsessed with money, but better to be obsessed with money now than with poverty hereafter.
When Lizzie and Darcy finally accept each other in "Pride & Prejudice," I felt an almost unreasonable happiness. Why was that? I am impervious to romance in most films, seeing it as a manifestation of box office requirements. Here is it different, because Darcy and Elizabeth are good and decent people who would rather do the right thing than convenience themselves. Anyone who will sacrifice their own happiness for higher considerations deserves to be happy. When they realize that about each other their hearts leap, and, reader, so did mine.