The new romantics
Lying, cheating, swapping, memory erasing, and attempted homicide – these days, date movies are not for the faint of heart.

By Lynn Rapoport

STROLLING INTO 1000 Van Ness to see Mike Nichols's grim relationship drama Closer one chill, rainy day in December, I inopportunely remembered a comment an acquaintance had made about the film. "Whatever you do," he'd grimly advised, "don't bring a date."

I had, and would have to make the best of it, but I saw his point. It wasn't your classic make-out movie – if such a thing exists in a post-drive-in era. Set in London and retaining the icy, measured traces and pacing of the play from which it was adapted, Closer follows a pained series of (largely) heterosexual pairings by two men and two women gripped variously by curiosity, libido, jealousy, ego, and something that keeps getting referred to as "love." Love, apparently, is holding on to someone with a grip that leaves a bruise, after winning him or her off someone else – a thought Nichols has apparently been holding on to since 1971's Carnal Knowledge.

For two hours we watched largely awful, largely incomprehensible people enjoy the butchered, partial relationships they deserved. Julia Roberts sulked, snapped photos, made wry observations, and cheated. Clive Owen struck up vicious, dirty conversations and manifested a barely controlled rage. Jude Law picked up women without malice or foresight. And Natalie Portman dazzled each of them in turn, cried a bit, then headed home to America, leaving behind three stuck, uncomprehending, unhappy people and an audience of uncomfortable, vaguely depressed moviegoers.

We walked out, shook it off. I felt a little queasy, though, and an odd trend seemed to be emerging. We Don't Live Here Anymore had finished the summer off, leaving the briefest respite between dueling films about lying, cheating, mean-spirited couples. More recently, Jean-Pierre Jeunet brought us a bloody, shell-shocked follow-up to his exquisitely romantic Amélie: the WWI-set A Very Long Engagement, in which Audrey Tautou embarks on an errand of love across a bombed-out landscape of veterans' memories, flashbacks awash with the blood and guts of soldiers.

On the new-release shelves: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's quarrelsome couple spiral downward into self-imposed brain damage. On the awards-ceremony circuit: Sideways's self-destructive, alcoholic oenophile mourns the past and fucks up the present, while his buddy attempts to stuff the maximum quantity of premarital sex into a bachelor road trip.

L'amour can be such a downer. It's lucky we have Mr. and Mrs. Smith to look forward to. Slated for June, the action-romance flick stars recently crowned tabloid prom king and queen Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the two Hollywood actors most likely to turn a theater of moviegoers to hot bubbling goop. If only their characters – married, bored, assassins for hire – weren't trying to spray each other full of bullet holes.

Of course, watching Brad and Angelina try to kill each other will probably be hotter than watching most people get it on, and I'm sure they'll get around to that as well. But at the moment, we're dealing with a rash of films that present views of romantic relationships ranging from wary to pained to jaw-droppingly pessimistic, with a few pit stops at bleak along the way.

A few cheery numbers – the Will Smith vehicle Hitch, the Bollywood-Jane Austen homage Bride and Prejudice, and the cliché-fest The Wedding Date – hit theaters this month hoping to catch people in the V-Day mood. Meanwhile, an impressive number of screens have given up on love altogether, occupying themselves instead with creepy children and the Fockers.

Immediate family provide one of the truest tests of love, but one wonders, without precisely missing it, what happened to Pretty Woman, to Sleepless in Seattle. One wonders, just out of curiosity – not to say wistfully or nostalgically – where the traditional date movie has wandered off to, and what exactly is filling the vacuum.

The rules

Question #1: What, one has the right to ask, is a date movie? Pressed to define it, I'm visited by the following free associations: Tom Cruise's car-salesman grin, Renée Zellweger's scrunched-up eyes, Freddie Prinze Jr.'s blank stare, Julia Roberts's laugh, Reese Witherspoon's forehead, Matthew McConaughey's leer, and the retch-inducing words "You complete me." Also teen pop stars enjoying their acting debut, synergistic soundtracks, a crestfallen moment of truth, a heartfelt reconciliation speech, the warm glow of wish fulfillment, and hopefully only one falling-in-love montage including popular activities such as sightseeing, shopping, getting caught in a rainstorm, and buying hot dogs or ice cream at an outdoor stand. Also – in a sinister diminishment of dots to be connected between first date and first dance at the reception – a wedding (and promotional tie-in on the cover of a bridal mag). I recently heard Troy described as the perfect gay-male date movie, but generally speaking, they tend not to involve bloodshed and CGI armies.

Question #2: Do dates ever, in fact, go out to see date movies? Personally, I save them for special occasions like the flu, or those empty Friday evenings when I don't feel like showering, the house is locked down, and all the flatmates are gone for the night (presumably out on dates). But since "date movie" is pretty much a construct adopted by marketing firms and accepted into the lexicon of film critics across the land, I'm guessing some portion of the viewing public does respectfully save these films for date night.

Question #3: What happens when a deficit occurs? Well, I assume people are still dating and still seeing movies. And while more of them are hitting the theaters for Babs and Dustin and Robert and Ben than for Julia and Clive and Natalie and Jude, the people continue to show signs of wanting love stories, even mangled ones. Lucky for them, films like Closer have stepped, at least temporarily, into the void, whether that void was created by a chill in the air, a new mood of national seriousness, or just the Academy casting its annual shadow.

Opening the lines of communication

Summarizing Closer for the New Yorker, Anthony Lane references "the level of honesty that demands such profane expression" – meaning, I guess, that when you strip things down to their unpleasant essentials, sometimes it requires a lot of cuss words. A line like that is catnip for me, which is probably how I ended up in the theater watching Owen confess to Roberts that he slept with a prostitute, Roberts confess to Owen that she's leaving him for another man, and Owen not so much drown his sorrows as infect an open wound at the strip club where Portman works – a sight both ghastly and repellent. Meanwhile, in We Don't Live Here Anymore, brutal honesty is just what happens when you've had too much to drink and been married too long – husbands and wives bitterly swapping one another over highballs, cheating out of boredom and career envy. It's hard to know where to turn; they're all so unlikable. Which can come as a shock after a steady diet of romantic comedies.

Consider a film like 2003's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, in which McConaughey's and Kate Hudson's characters are tasked with turning each other off. Their underlying mission is clearly to charm the pants off of us and each other. Otherwise, why would we care whether they end up together at last? The promotional tagline for that movie (which I trashed upon release but now watch every time it shows up on cable) was "One of them is lying. So is the other." So, some date-movie haters might say, is the film itself, in presenting this scenario as one of those New York stories that could happen to you.

Closer would probably like to suggest the same thing, but it's more like a cautionary tale: do not, if you can possibly avoid it, try this at home. One gets the sense that Nichols is trying, mightily, to get to some center of things that feels more true. Whether either film truly succeeds, once the toxins have cleared the air, is another story, but it's interesting how ugly he thinks that place is.

By comparison, the candor and nakedness on display in Kinsey, Bill Condon's biopic about '50s sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey, is refreshingly hopeful. Can a biopic be a date movie? One that's all about sex is a likely exception to any rule.

You could call Kinsey's work – demystifying society's sexual practices in the hopes that we'll be happier and healthier knowing – a kind of philanthropy, involving an unerotic love of the human species. But Kinsey is so much about how people communicate when they're romantically and sexually entwined. The truthfulness that's used to maim or attract in Closer here serves an unconventional marriage that changes shapes over the years. And one of the film's favorite ideas to play with is the man obsessed with sex (its scientific truths, that is) yet exceedingly clumsy with matters of the heart – a familiar date-movie theme.

Starting fresh

A Very Long Engagement is less interested in the truth about cats and dogs and more so in the truth that war is hell. And yet director Jeunet relays that message by setting his main character on a possibly endless quest to locate her fiancé, lost on the battlefield and presumed by everyone else to be pushing up daisies. Taking up the notion of enduring love and seeing it through to its illogical conclusion, the whole movie comes to hang on it, heavily, and we watch it grow thinner.

You could say (spoiler alert) that true love wins out, but Princess Bride it isn't: what Tautou finds at the end of her wanderings is a young man who's been undone by the war, mind lost, memory – of her and all their promises – gone. The last shot leaves her in a garden with him, calmly watching her dreams reshape themselves, and I'm not sure whether Jeunet means for us to hope he'll recover. It's an odd conclusion: not quite a tragedy, but an unsettling imbalance in the world, where once two people believed themselves to be perfectly matched.

What could be more romantic than the trace chance of salvation through love, of a wound, an illness, or even a death notice that can be worked through and left behind? I guess it would be two people who have done their worst to each other, undergone a medical procedure to extract all traces of the relationship from their memories, found each other again (fate? serendipity? pixie dust?), and decided to retake the risk – as proposed in Michel Gondry's tale of whirlwind romance, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Running with a handful of unraveling romantic clichés, the film comes to a halt before a devastating idea: that two people – clear-sighted despite memory loss – might walk back into something they have recorded proof will cause them pain, of a type they were willing to undergo neurological tampering to be quit of the first go-round. It's romantic, and probably insane.

Which is interesting. Entwining, and sometimes knotting, the threads of mental health and true love, these films (along with Garden State, another movie in which a young man suffers a grave psychic wound) are some of the most love-affirming I've seen lately. But they seem to be saying that while it's possible love will prevail, it may require brain damage.

Eternal Sunshine is an eerie blend of pained realism and giddy fantasia. In a way, it's the same age-old conceit of enduring love – Gondry's just playfully unpacking it for us, without really suggesting we move on to anything new. Toying with the idea of overt delusion, the film calls to mind in particular the coyer fantasies stoked by films like You've Got Mail and any of a hundred recent rom-coms in which hate is remarkably transformed into love via chemistry masked as truer understanding.

On the 'Bride' side

That would inevitably include Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice, opening this Friday in an explosion of weddings, fights, public market song-and-dance numbers involving drag queens and pastry sellers, beachside song-and-dance numbers involving a gospel choir and surfers, more fights, more weddings, a smattering of declamations and reconciliations, and inevitably, more weddings. You could say the Austen novel it pays tribute to is the root of all this evil, though I'd have to beat you to a pulp.

The thing is, they can't all be Eternal Sunshines. And they won't be. Does that mean we should have to suffer through another decade of inelegant cannibalizations like The Wedding Date? Watching it, I was reminded of Sleepless in Seattle's panting homage to An Affair to Remember. Underlying Sleepless's relentless trope of soft-hearted women (from Venus) obsessed with Affair and weepily quoting from it, while various men (from Mars) looked on in perplexed dismay, was a truly shocking concept: that a film about love can resonate, or at least remain quotable, over decades – as the novel Pride and Prejudice has.

Perhaps what's going on right now is a desire to make movies that are capable of leaving such an impression, or at least one you'll be trying to scrub off your skin for a while. In the hands of Doug Liman (Go), Mr. and Mrs. Smith stands a good chance of doing so, if only by stretching out to movie length the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon device of foreplay via armed combat – and by satisfying millions of tabloid readers' need to see for themselves, as US Weekly termed it on a recent cover, "How Jen Found Out."

With romantic comedy, it's proved difficult. Even a more promising, genuinely funny one like Hitch – in which Will Smith plays love doctor to a city of hapless, desperate men – is unlikely to last more than a few weeks in the cultural memory. We've seen so many over the decades, and they all turn out the same – which is also why we watch them, maybe because we're obsessed with the star power they draw, maybe for the same reason we watch soaps like The O.C., maybe because in the end we'd rather have our delusions.