Why does the pealing of church bells make our hearts go pitter-patter? Why does the exchanging of vows cause our throats to grow lumpy? Why, in other words, are we all agog over weddings?
Perhaps it’s because a wedding is one of the few occasions in contemporary life in which all participants have only the best intentions. Whatever unhappiness might later come their way, the bride and groom are present with the expectation of embarking on a lifetime together, and the couple’s family, friends, and casual acquaintances are there to root them on. The organist is playing only celebratory songs. The officiant is saying only good thoughts.
The same can be said of the well-worn genre of the romantic comedy, which, since its earliest well-known incarnations in the 1930s, more often than not works a wedding into the plot. Numerous classic romantic comedies either culminate in a blissfully right wedding, as in George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940), or feature a wrong wedding averted, as in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967), or close with the promise of future nuptials between the leading couple, as in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed (1981).
Perhaps the definitive example of the compatibility of matrimonial bonds with high comedy is Four Weddings and a Funeral, the 1994 surprise hit, starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell, that was released at the high point of a vogue for romantic comedies that lasted from the late 1980s until the early 2010s. In the judgment of author Scott Meslow, these years represented the apogee of a form whose appeal is pretty easy to understand. “Rom-coms are, practically by definition, a hopeful genre: they tell you that you should be yourself (without apology or self-consciousness), hang on to your dreams (even when they don’t make sense), and — above all — hold out for true love, because it always might be just around the corner,” Meslow writes in his new book From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy.
Writing with authority and affection, Meslow spotlights more than a dozen comedies, starting with 1989’s When Harry Met Sally… and concluding with 2018’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, as case studies of the genre during its peak years of popularity and a little after. Meslow trudges through the production history of each film, from conception to reception, and he has a nice feel for the way these films, like most films, result from a combination of talent, luck, and happenstance. Did you know that when director Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron had their first meeting, Reiner was interested in Ephron writing a movie about a lawyer, not the film that became When Harry Met Sally…? Or that Reiner saw his then-girlfriend Elizabeth McGovern in the role of Sally, ultimately given to Meg Ryan (whom Reiner later describes, not without justification, as “the most adorable girl in the world”)? Or that Four Weddings and a Funeral was originally titled Four Weddings and a Honeymoon and did indeed omit a funeral and include a honeymoon? Let us be grateful that cooler heads prevailed.
The process by which P.J. Hogan’s 1997 romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, a truly inspired film that garnered the attention of no less an eminence than the great British Marxist film critic Robin Wood, arrived at its distinctive sweetly sad ending, as opposed to the wish-fulfillment fantasy originally envisioned by the screenwriter, is fascinating — and a testament to the underrated wisdom of preview audiences. The best films here, from When Harry Met Sally… to My Best Friend’s Wedding, are worthy of the attention Meslow gives them.
Threaded throughout the book is a series of engaging, entertaining short “essays” on notable personages from the romantic comedy’s most recent golden era. Bill Pullman describes being cast as the lovable schlub whom Meg Ryan discards for Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle (1993): “There were just a lot of stories at the time where the second male lead got the shaft. And I wasn’t in a position, box-office-wise, to take the first male lead.” Meanwhile, the genre was something of a lifeline to Drew Barrymore, who, in Meslow’s telling, finally rid herself of a virtual lifetime of bad press when she had the bright idea to appear alongside Adam Sandler in a romantic comedy — the film that became 1998’s The Wedding Singer, also the unlikely start of Sandler’s career as a rom-com leading man. “I wanted to make love stories,” Barrymore says. “But I wanted them to have a certain energy that was about true love and chemistry and timelessness, and I was convinced of us doing something together.”
Meslow effortlessly winds his way through the flotsam and jetsam of American popular culture of the past quarter century, but in his choice to confine himself to films made after 1989, the year of When Harry Met Sally…, he consigns the reader to discussions of a series of increasingly dumb, dull films, not worthy of the genre, things such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003) and Friends with Benefits (2011). Katherine Heigl and Dane Cook aren’t quite as captivating as Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant.
Meslow strains to explain the methodology by which he selected the films discussed, but his brief, reluctant references to Woody Allen’s 1977 Oscar-winning classic Annie Hall give the game away: If Meslow had opened his book even a decade earlier, he would have had to account more fully for Allen’s single-handed resuscitation of the romantic comedy genre. Unfortunately, cancel culture dictates that Allen isn’t allowed to be written about appreciatively, at least not at any length, so we’re just left to infer the outsize influence of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and more on the films included here. Omitted entirely are even older films, such as The Philadelphia Story or The Thin Man series, which set the template for romantic comedies of years to come and certainly hold up better than, well, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
In later chapters, Meslow writes about signs of a romantic comedy resurgence — Netflix keeps churning out content in the genre, and genre stalwarts Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Lopez will return to the form this year — but he misses the real reason for the genre’s resilience: It’s one of the last types of film through which traditional ideas about romantic love can be unapologetically expressed. In this light, the mildly anti-abortion sentiments in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007), which Meslow writes about a touch defensively, noting that the film “doesn’t openly reject a pro-choice perspective,” are perfectly understandable. By and large, these are films in which men are men and women are women and couples pair off and they have babies and they all live happily ever after.
Meslow comes to praise the romantic comedy, but if he had given a fuller accounting of the genre’s history and enduring allure, he would have had a richer, less superficial book.
Peter Tonguette is a frequent contributor to the American Conservative, National Review, and Wall Street Journal.
