THERE ARE THREE QUALITIES ESSENTIAL for any successful romantic comedy. First, it has to be amusing. Not screamingly funny, necessarily, but lighthearted and diverting enough to hold one’s attention. Second, there have to be a few eccentric secondary characters who will provide jolts of unexpected life. Since the three-act storyline of a romantic comedy–boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl–has a foregone conclusion and provides no suspense, there’s a limit to how surprising and interesting the main characters can be.
Finally, and most surprising in light of the fact that the movie in question is a comedy, there must be a palpable undercurrent of melancholy. The lead characters in a romantic comedy must feel dissatisfied, must be aware that there is a gaping chasm in their lives, must feel themselves to be wounded and hollow. At the same time, they must be afflicted by a kind of reticence that makes them fear the chasm will never be filled.
That reticence, that lassitude, is what gives these movies their unique erotic charge. Every good romantic comedy features at least one scene in which the two lead characters are desperately hungry for each other, so hungry that the audience practically shouts out “Kiss her!” But for the characters themselves, it can’t be that simple. If it were, there would be no movie. The impulsive act simply of shattering the invisible barrier between them, and giving in to their passion, seems impossible.
Before the sexual revolution, the main problem was the seriousness with which erotic intimacy was taken. Or there were other, more concrete, obstacles in the path of our would-be lovers during Hollywood’s golden age. One of the characters might be engaged to somebody else, and so the kiss would be a betrayal. Or one has arrived at the moment of intimacy through an act of deliberate deception–by telling a really bad lie that, once confessed, will end the relationship forever.
With the advent of our more sexualized society, sex itself became the cause of the invisible barrier. Or, rather, the fear of sex. In the best modern romantic comedies (When Harry Met Sally . . . ) both characters fear that erotic intimacy will destroy a friendship they both need more than sex. And they are right to fear it. The sex they do have doesn’t make them fall in love with each other; the destruction of their friendship does. Fear of sex is an element of most present-day romantic comedies. The wildly raunchy 40-Year-Old Virgin, which takes an unexpected turn into romantic comedy, pushes this to the logical extreme: The title character’s efforts to avoid sex at all costs is misread by the woman he loves as enlightened understanding.
Someone once said that every popular song has to figure out a new way to say “I love you” in 32 bars. In the same fashion, every romantic comedy must figure out a way to keep two characters apart for 90 minutes who are destined to be together–and without driving the audience crazy. Marc Levy, a French novelist, came up with a corker of a twist in his bestselling If Only It Were True, the most popular book published in France this decade. His story has been Americanized into the extraordinarily sweet new romantic comedy Just Like Heaven.
Just Like Heaven fulfills the basic requirements of the classic romantic comedy. It amuses, even if it never makes you howl with laughter. It has three terrific secondary characters–a stoner psychic, a party-animal-turned-raging-mom, and a sexually unscrupulous psychiatrist–who light up the screen every time they appear.
But where this movie really scores is in the melancholy longing department. Elizabeth, a committed but companionless San Francisco doctor (Reese Witherspoon), is an hour late for a blind date arranged by her demanding sister (the uproarious Dina Waters) when a truck swerves into her car’s path. A few months later, a reclusive and secretive young man named David (Mark Ruffalo) moves into a well-decorated and fully furnished sublet in Pacific Heights, only to find a very angry Elizabeth popping up here and there, insisting it’s her place, demanding he use coasters, and in general being very annoying.
She can’t quite remember who she is, and she keeps walking through walls and vanishing into thin air. Still, she insists she’s not a ghost, even though no one but David can see her. And after a brief fling at thinking he’s crazy, David decides she’s real enough to be exorcised. That doesn’t work, either, despite a consultation with a charmingly oddball clerk at an occult bookstore (Jon Heder of Napoleon Dynamite) who offers David the inscrutable opinion that the ghostly Elizabeth isn’t really a ghost.
The relationship between them starts out as The Odd Couple, with Felix being dead, and moves onto When Harry Met Sally . . . with Sally being dead until, in its final 30 minutes, it becomes something new and original. For, of course, David and Elizabeth fall in love; and, of course, David’s love for Elizabeth saves him from the despair into which he had fallen. Yet Elizabeth can’t be touched, and must be saved from her in-between existence. The dilemma is that by saving her, he will lose her.
Reese Witherspoon is delightful and touching here, but the movie really belongs to Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo, who turned in one of the great performances of our time as the wounded brother in the wonderful You Can Count on Me five years ago, doesn’t have the physical authority of a movie star–and thus it seems entirely understandable for him to be almost instantly overwhelmed and under the thumb of the tiny but very authoritative Witherspoon. What Ruffalo has, more than any other young American actor now working, is the ability to convey a world of feeling through his soulful eyes and his expressive body language. You believe he is grieving as the movie begins, and you believe he begins to come alive as he involves himself in Elizabeth’s plight.
Just as David and Elizabeth yearn for each other hopelessly, you yearn for them to find a way to be together. And that’s the final element of all successful romantic comedies–that they manage to trick you into worrying the ending might be an unhappy one when you know full well that, in the end, boy always gets girl.
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
