My Best Friend's Wedding: Deconstructing the Deconstructive Rom-Com

 

Well, Wicked is doing laps around the box office, so it looks as though the Hollywood musical is saved, at least for a season, so I guess we’ll turn our attention to another neglected genre. 

         As with something like the musical, the rom-com is one of those genres that the rising generation will always want to interrogate, to catch it on its lie. The whole thing seems to float on fabrication and promising that of which we can always be skeptical—the happy ending. This is also why they’re easy to make fun of and are made to feel second-tier after “realer” films which aren’t building a fantasy. You know? Movies like Die Hard … 

We could choose any number of rom-coms, but the one that I feel like diving into today is 1997’s underrated My Best Friend’s Wedding. I’m selecting it for a number of reasons. Among these is my own personal fondness for the film, and also the fact that it boasts a paltry 6.3 on IMDb despite its cult-favorite status. But mostly, it’s a deconstructive film that adds something to the conversation in a way that most deconstructive films wish they could. 

The first time we see Jules (Julia Roberts), she’s explaining to her friend, George (Rupert Everett), that she’s expecting a call from her old flame and best friend, Michael (Dermot Mulroney), with whom she made a marriage pact some ten years earlier. George teases her that he’s finally come to make good on this agreement. Jules dismisses the idea, only to privately discover that she’s keen to the idea. She braces herself during Michael’s phone call, only for him to tell her he’s engaged to someone else and wants her to be there for the wedding. Jules accepts the invitation–knowing she has one chance to secure the man of her dreams. 

Michael’s fiance, Kimmie (Cameron Diaz), takes to Jules immediately, seemingly unaware of Jules’ devious intentions. Jules spends the weekend finding small but cutting ways to break them up. Most of them involve Jules trying to show Michael she’s not as perfect as she seems, like when Jules corners her into giving a horrendous karaoke performance. During this whole scheme, George shows up to give Jules emotional reinforcement, only for her to have him posed as her boyfriend to make Michael jealous. (The joke being that George is very, very gay.) Consistently, George tells her that the only way this works out is if she stops being surreptitious and just tells Michael she loves him and accepts whatever his answer is. Jules, of course, cannot bring herself to do this, so she continues to sabotage. 

It is only hours before the ceremony that Jules finally tells Michael that she loves him and kisses him just as Kimmie walks in. There is a three-part chase with Kimmie, Michael, and Jules, with Jules confronting how awful her behavior has been. She finds Michael at the train station and confesses to her part in trying to break them up all weekend. Michael berates her for a moment and then thanks her for loving him that much. Jules tries to atone for her transgression by finding Kimmie, Jules admitting to her wrongdoing but insisting that Michael does not return her affections and convincing Kimmie to go on with the wedding. Jules attends the ceremony and watches her best friend get married to someone else, offering the happy couple a sincere toast at the reception. Before leaving with Kimmie, Michael finds her in the crowd and tells her goodbye. While Jules is making peace with her decision, George offers to dance with her.

         There’s a lot about this film that I love. Casting, which is so essential in a low-budget character piece like this, is exceptional. Julia Roberts is a rose every moment she’s onscreen. Cameron Diaz makes “too good to be true” seem all too accessible. Dermot Mulroney is probably the closest thing we get to a straight man, yet that only adds to his endearingness. Rupert Everett manages to be the smartest person in the room, but that doesn’t stop him from bringing fireworks into the story when the situation calls for it. 

Screenwriter, Ron Bass, was moved to write the story after reading about a similar situation in which a woman reported realizing she was in love with her best friend just as he announced he was marrying someone else. It was part of his original pitch that the heroine wouldn’t get the guy. Bass says, "One of the reasons I wrote this movie is I wanted Julia's character to lose the guy and to lose the guy for the right reasons. I wanted for the audience to be in a position where they didn't know what the filmmaker was going to do, because they didn't know what they wanted themselves." This most transgressive of all subversions–not letting the girl get the guy at the end–kind of runs against the entire foundation of the rom-com genre. It is also one of the reasons why this film works so well. 

Now, I’ll clarify and say that I don’t mean that this film is some victory over the rom-com formula. I don’t want to throw the entire genre under the bus, and honestly I don’t think this film does either. Because the truth is, in execution, it isn’t really that subversive. I’d hesitate to call it revisionist. The people I know who love this movie the most tend to love it alongside more conventional rom-coms. My Best Friend’s Wedding isn’t really here to outsmart your grandparent’s rom-com so much as have an earnest heart to heart with it. 

     Film as a whole, and rom-coms specifically, are often discussed as purely wish fulfillment or fantasy. That has always been a way of demeaning the artform, and the people who take it as their refuge. But films like My Best Friend’s Wedding attest to me the power of both the specific genre and the medium as a whole. It’s not just about escaping unpleasant reality or feeding a delusion. Storytelling is a powerful method of reconciling oneself to the parts of reality that are hard to face and allowing oneself to find peace through it.

The Life Cycle of the Rom-Com

The Awful Truth (1937)

     As a genre, they’ve never truly gone into hibernation, but the heydays of the rom-com have definitely come and gone in waves. In cinema’s first golden age, romantic comedies were a staple of the medium. The repartee between the young lovers was perfect training ground for sharp writing, and where better to find a dazzling star for the masses to adore than in the arms of another star?

This was followed by massive cultural overturn in the 60s and 70s which reshaped not only the structure of Hollywood, but also the country itself, something we looked at in our analysis of The Graduate. The emotional timbre of those days was kind of like what you see here in the 2020s—deep-rooted suspicion of the powers that be and the stories they tell. Distrust of the American dream and the happily ever after demanded that Hollywood throw away the tinsel and start reflecting the world as it really was. The Sound of Music gave way to Cabaret. This left the rom-com in a precarious position.

    The most iconic rom-com of the 1970s, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, was very much a post-modern take on the genre, tracking the life cycle of a romance that ultimately disintegrates—which we are warned about in the film’s opening minutes, and this is reportedly just what audiences were after. Annie Hall was a box office hit and winner of the best picture award at the Oscars that year. Seeing through the artifice of older stories like this gave a post-Watergate audience security and assurance that they would not be fooled by the powers that be and the stories they told a second time.

         This time period also overlapped with a lot of social advances, like second-wave feminism—women were allowed to go to work now. A woman could aspire for more than just being swept off her feet. So, from a certain perspective, romance and domestic paradise were relics of the past.

         Now, this overview is obviously sanding off some nuances and taking some things for granted. There was always a lot more going on with the classical rom-com than herding livestock into the breeding corral to spawn more proletariat workers for the machine. Rom-com heroines especially were allowed to be multi-dimensional entities and hallmarks of masterful writing, beacons of wit and vitality. And whoever said that women have to choose between being romantic and being fulfilled? But … let’s save that all for another conversation and decide for this moment that there is a portion of the audience that distrusts the rom-com in its traditional form.

While You Were Sleeping (1995)

      By the end of the 1980s, the world more or less relapsed back into the old ways, and this is where the rom-com starts to get its footing back, starting with movies like When Harry Met Sally and continuing for the next decade or so. Across the rom-com boom of the ‘90s, there was a return to form, yes, but the clock never really resets. The cynicism of the ‘70s had been fully internalized into the system.

And that doesn’t have to be an entirely bad thing. For one thing, you saw heroines who had more vocal professional aspirations. But anytime the pendulum swings, there’s always the question of whether it’s gone too far. A key point of Annie Hall is how the hyper-intellectualism that the film proudly fortifies itself in is also the thing that pushes Annie away. After this attitude has had some twenty years to proliferate, one might be long to wonder whether something was lost once society made the jump to hyperawareness. 

It’s in this environment that we get My Best Friend’s Wedding, a story about a professional woman who thinks she has everything she’s ever wanted until the most important man decides to give his heart to a hopeless romantic, and this triggers a crisis for her. I think we can see the fingerprints of Annie Hall over this scenario.

        It's also worth mentioning that the 90s had a sort of heyday with metatextuality and deconstructivism. My Best Friend’s Wedding came out less than a year after Scream, which revived the slasher genre, also fading in relevance at this time. This it did by internally referencing and the conventions and tropes laid out by slasher classics and rebuffing them. Unlike Scream, My Best Friend’s Wedding makes no real overt references to older entries within the genre.

         But there is something vaguely postmodern about this movie’s setup. Here’s a heroine who has rejected the old simplicities and started to wonder if doing so was the right call. 

Jules – Post-Modern Rom-Com Heroine

The movie proper opens with a kitchen in chaos as it scrambles to serve Jules with the perfect meal. From this, we understand that our leading lady is used to having things tailored for her. Even the breakup that spurred their friendship happened exactly on her terms. The Jules we see here is kept, cultured, and in control. This hyper professionalism is also what will make her wild antics so entertaining. (As a side note, I am roughly the same age as Jules and Michael, yet they both write about their passions, make bank doing it, and presumably have been for a while … I hate the ‘90s.)

    When we meet Kimmie, we see that her and Jules are set up as visual contrasts right from the start. Jules’ hair is long, voluminous, and brunette, Kimmie’s is short, straight, and blonde. Jules is wearing a gray professional suit, Kimmie looks like she just came from a poolside birthday party for a sunflower. But that’s just their physical appearance. Their personalities clash even more aggressively.

Kimmie recalls a sort of emotional fragility that feels like it was warped from a prior era, liable to start tearing up if she thinks for a moment that she's offended the love of her life. If Jules saw Kimmie show up in a movie, she’d probably laugh at that movie and that character for displaying some horribly antiquated portrait of femininity—and this is exactly the kind of person that her best friend has chosen to marry.

    Even more agonizing, Kim is truly romantic. She does what romantic brides do. She follows her true love wherever he goes and is grateful for it. Kimmie explains, “He’s not a balance sheet. He’s Michael, and I love all of him.” Jules herself reports to George that Kimmie is, “... vulnerable and endearing, and that is annoying as s***. If I didn’t hate her, I’d adore her.” 

This entire trial interrogates the viability of this old-fashioned concept of romance--this has also presumably been a really quick courtship. The first time Jules learns about Kimmy is when Michael invites her to the wedding. Jules believes that such a thing couldn’t happen—or if it could, then surely not to someone as enlightened and right minded as she and Michael: if only she could get Michael to see this. The lie that Jules tells herself to justify her scorched earth is that this hyper-romantic setup cannot possibly be sustainable in this modern day. In trying to correct what she tells herself is a cosmic error, she is covering for the fact that she had an opportunity for such a happily ever after and buried it because she thought herself beyond that all.

    This rivalry between Kimmie and Jules becomes so personal to Jules because she is watching her living antithesis get to walk away with her prize. As Jules tries to understand what it is about Kimmie that Michael sees in her, she’s learning what it is about her that apparently makes her unlovable. Michael explains to Jules midway through, “When I hug her, I don’t have to worry about letting go,” something that Jules did when she and Michael were together. That which Jules might have once called weakness starts to look a lot like loyalty, something Jules has to confront she doesn’t have.

So there’s a lot going on here with Jules as a character influencing why she sets out to ruin a wedding that has to do with a lot more than simple entitlement. But it does pose the question, if Kimmie is just a token for something else, does that apply to Michael as well? What does Jules even want?

It’s clear that Jules does have that vital connection to Michael specifically, and a part of her fears the loss of a future with her soulmate in him. (It’s also suggested that Michael has the capacity to feel romantically for Jules as well—we assume that he feels genuinely jealous when he thinks Jules is in love with George.)  But on another level, her best friend is just a figurehead. It isn’t really until Michael is off the menu that Jules decides that securing him is the single most important thing. It’s not necessarily that she is convinced Michael is the only person who could make her happy; she’s scared that she is denied any happy ending under the hyper-rational outlook which she has embraced. George asks her straight out, “Do you really love him, or is this just about winning?”

         Jules’ efforts to snare Michael have as much to do with avoiding solitude as they do with securing happiness. Jules has fallen prey to what society wants all women to fear, that if they are not grafted to their life partner before thirty, they are resigned to a lifetime of misery. That is the basis for a perfectly strong character arc.

 

Jules and Her Character Flaws

      Even in the process of writing this piece, I actually came across a meme crying about how this movie and this protagonist was just so toxic. And at a passing glance, I can understand why—this is a story about a woman who sets out to ruin the love life of someone she reports to love. I wrote specifically about this movie, for example, when we talked about Main Character Syndrome and the way that Jules deludes herself into thinking that her actions are justified because the world somehow hinges on her romantic fulfillment. We get to watch this woman try to tear apart a couple that seems perfectly in love using some really underhanded methods.

         To put her crimes in perspective, some of the things Jules does in the name of love include capitalizing on Kimmie’s stage fright by forcing her to perform karaoke in a bar full of strangers, forging an email that has the potential to get Michael fired, and kissing her friend on the morning he is getting married. There are a lot of other peripheral ways that Jules’ mission has her stomping all over her best friend, like when she tells Michael that his job isn’t really a grownup job. This she all does in the name of love, but the impulses it brings out in her certainly don’t befit the title of “best friend.”

    Director PJ Hogan described reading the script for the first time, saying, “... my experience of reading the screenplay was, ‘Wow, I’m not sure I like her very much.’ And usually in romantic comedies, everything the main character does in order to win love and to find happiness is totally justified. Even if it’s kind of awful. What Meg Ryan does to Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle is kind of awful ... Most romantic comedies are about how all’s fair in love and war, which is something I have never really believed in. And this was a screenplay about how all is not fair in love and war. It was a romantic comedy that wasn’t very romantic.”

    If there is one thread in this movie where the film’s post-modern-ness is strongest, it’s probably here in the deconstructiveness of the romantic heroine’s motivations. The film asks, can this rampage possibly be justified under the pretense of love?   

         That said, I think viewers absolutely have the capacity to recognize the wrongness of Jules’ actions while still having sympathy for her.

     I think it’s also essential to note, for one, that Jules doesn’t actually wind up getting away with anything. She does not go unpunished. There is, for example, an element of justice being served as Kimmie tears Jules a new one in the women’s locker room, and all the other women are just roasting her with their eyes and savoring her punishment. Kimmie gets to drop her “oopsie-daisy” affect to spew fury on Jules. Her transgressions absolutely do not go unexamined in the text.

         And it’s not readily obvious from the start that this is the way the film is going to go. Whether she gets what she deserves, whatever that means, is a point of tension—it could go either way. The possibility, not the inevitability, is what gives this storyline so much juice. But I also don’t know if it was really supposed to be a surprise that Jules is the bad guy in this story. The self-serving impulse at work here, and the genuine harm she is threatening to wreak, always feel concealed behind a very thin layer of self-denial that the audience I think was always meant to see through. But I also don’t think that this film is purely punitive or if that’s the lens through which we ought to view the film.

Fatal Attraction (1987)

    The “other woman” has long been a feature in the romance world, and most prior depictions were vilified, or at least lacking in depth. And so there is something humanizing in putting us in the shoes of the other woman, the one threatening to destroy the union of the breeding pair, and forcing us to reckon with how the “other woman” may have genuine feelings and may be genuinely worthy of empathy. (Similar to what we discussed with "The Other Woman" featuring Natalie Portman.)

This is all obviously presented through the lens of comedy and absurdity, but the film also allows moments for the heroine to reckon with the gravity of what is transpiring. We are supposed to be sad for Jules as she is watching Michael walk away with someone else. Even as we know that what she's doing is unfair, we’re supposed to tear up when she and Michael are dancing on the boat under the bridge together. We’re supposed to be mourning with her as this road is closed to her forever. But that’s exactly why this story is so powerful. That is why we can’t help but respect her. She is doing a hard thing.

I saw this movie a little less than twenty years after it came out, and those four or five seconds after Jules makes her confession to Michael, I honestly wasn’t sure what was going to happen in part because, as Bass predicted, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to happen. All I really knew was that the person in front of us was baring her soul to us, and there was something deeply moving about that. I wasn’t about to excuse what she was doing, but I definitely wanted to give this girl a hug. Dermot Mulroney I think had the right idea when he described her character as a “sad clown.” Her tomfoolery ultimately works for our entertainment, but it’s her tragic insecurity that’s on display for us. All these hijinks and best laid plans all emerge out of a place of fear and insecurity.

        As with a lot of these stories, we recognize that the answer is staring our heroine in the face right from the start, but as with a lot of a lot of good stories, this film recognizes that the distance between those two points is a lot larger than it appears on paper. To share those feelings and not have them reciprocated is this unspeakable conclusion that cannot be imagined. That is what motivates so much denial and repression. This movie puts that all into words and form and lets our heroine come out the other side in one piece. The film hangs on the potential fears of a post-rom-com mindset and forces it to ask some questions, but it doesn't confirm its worst fears. Jules is not condemned for having chosen this post-modern approach to romance. 

There was a version of this ending where Jules wound up meeting some handsome stranger at the very end who offered to dance with her, and we were left to imagine that this was the first step to her happy ever after, and I definitely think the studio made the right call in ditching it in favor of “By God, there’ll be dancing!” Bass also said that, "The preview audience mirrored my feelings of, are you crazy. How could you end the movie like that: Are we really saying Julia Roberts needs to find the love of her life in the next five minutes?"

         The movie is kind to Jules in not giving her what she wants, and also not serving her a happy ending right off the bat. She isn’t saddled with the urgency to tether herself to a happy ending she hasn’t discovered on her own yet. But more importantly, she won’t be made to wander in solitude and despair in the interim. It will happen on her own calendar. And until then, she can look forward to a whole lot of dancing.

    I don’t know if any of us actually live in a post-modern world, or heck, if anyone ever has, but for those of us who sometimes feel that way, the movie does grant a consolation, a promise, some assurance, that there is happiness ahead.

 

 Ever After?

The rom-com cycle has continued into the 21st century, with most agreeing that the genre is in a state of relative dormancy. They’re a reliable draw as Netflix originals, but as I’ve written about previously, even Netflix “hits” aren’t in a position to leave much impact on the zeitgeist, at least not under their current business model.

I, Robot (2004)

    As CGI started eating up a larger part of the cinema landscape in the 2000s, character-bound pieces that didn't rely on pure spectacle had a harder time keeping up. Studios diverted fewer resources into this field, leading to weaker products which only encouraged studios to greenlit fewer opportunities for exposure. There are concentrated exceptions to this rule, but generally the rom-com engine has to be an added feature to a fuller package, in the same way it is in the action-adventure romance with The Lost City. Straight rom-coms are just a harder sell.

    Anyone But You takes a similar post-modernism stance on the genre, but much less gracefully. There’s a segment where the breeding pair’s friends try to play “Much Ado About Nothing” and deliberately arrange for the lovers to “overhear” a fabricated rumor that both halves are secretly in love with the other. Of course, Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney are immediately like, “Wait, I’ve seen this movie before!” and are quick to pontificate on how ridiculous it was that they ever thought this would work. This only sets an impossibly high bar for itself as audiences are asked to entertain the absurdities inherent in that exact film--which are far more contrived here than in a film like My Best Friend’s Wedding. People just don't know how to commit to pure romance without snickering.

This poses the question of whether audiences will ever really go for proper rom-coms again or if they must always be tucked into this coating of deconstruction, successfully applied or not.

    To me, it's similar to the question of whether or not the world has "moved on" from something like Disney fairy-tales, as we discussed in our essay on Tangled. People will always be quick to try to prove they are above disappointment by distancing themselves from anything that demands vulnerability, but they also distance themselves from opportunities for happiness or growth. Sometimes, people just need the reminder of how rewarding this game can be when you give yourself a new entry point.

Writer Scott Meslow observed in his book, From Hollywood With Love (quoted here from Vulture), "While Roberts never made a rom-com quite as unconventional again, she had proved that there was an appetite for romantic comedies that challenged a series of tropes that were, by 1997, already beginning to feel a little entrenched. There are few more reliable premises for a romantic comedy than a love triangle, but Roberts had harnessed her own star power, and her status as a rom-com heroine, to make one in which the resolution could be genuinely surprising to the audience [...] If you could make a rom-com where Julia Roberts doesn’t get the man of her dreams and end up with a blockbuster-size hit … well, what other kinds of romantic comedies might audiences be interested in seeing?"

I'd be happy to find out.

            --The Professor