Some romantic comedies tie themselves up in knots trying to come up with fresh ways to make the basic conceit of two people falling in love novel again. Some can get away with their absurdities, thanks either to smart subversion of expectation or straightforward win-you-over charm. Sleepless in Seattle (1993), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), and The Parent Trap (1998) come to mind. But in others, like Never Been Kissed (1999), 50 First Dates (2004), or the recent Your Place or Mine, the absurdities are so galling, and so unprotected by that aforementioned subversiveness or charm, that you don’t notice anything besides how much you can’t believe what’s going on is actually going on.
Runaway Bride (1999) is a romantic comedy that belongs in the latter camp. It’s so hard to be convinced by it that by the time the characters you know from the jump are supposed to fall in love start to fall in love, you feel like you could do without that inevitability. I’m wont to think the title of the movie, and the fact that it would be reuniting director Garry Marshall with stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere after the huge success of 1990’s Pretty Woman, as being the only things needed for the movie to be greenlit. The screenplay has a surprisingly auxiliary quality. Runaway Bride is the kind of movie confident it’ll bait people without knowing, exactly, how to make good on whatever hypotheticals the audience had been making up about it before seeing it.
The film is about the unlikely relationship that develops between people who, at first glance, seem likelier to swear themselves lifelong enemies. Maggie (Roberts) is an affable small-town Maryland girl with a time-tested habit of leaving soon-to-be husbands at the altar. (Even her town’s young priest, played by Donal Logue, is a scorned ex.) Ike (Gere) is a USA Today columnist who usually writes pieces about sex and dating that strike most women as sexist. He hears gossip about Maggie from a drunkard at a bar — the guy is ostensibly the last man to get jilted in spectacular fashion — and decides to write a bizarre hit piece-style column about her mostly because he’s struggling for a topic and a deadline is looming. One involving a serial runaway bride seems juicy enough to waste 1,000 words on.
The piece, though, leads to trouble. Because he pretty much entirely relied on the bitter testimony of a man who isn’t sober, Ike’s brash assertions, and the way he relates them to broader misunderstandings in straight gender relations, are littered with factual inaccuracies and other distortions to better prove his points. This all only comes to light after Maggie is understandably moved to write a sharp-tongued letter to the editor, which Ike shockingly seems surprised she’d want to write. Resigning at first seems the only option, per his editor who also happens to be his ex-wife (Rita Wilson). Then Ike gets another chance. If he travels to Maryland to write a more factual account of Maggie’s life, then the damage presumably will be fixed.
The earlier section of Runaway Bride is where it’s strongest — where Ike, almost impish, is trying to ingratiate himself into Maggie’s life and the latter, often accompanied by a strong group of friends (whose de-facto leader is played by Joan Cusack), is figuring out ways to throw him off course. But the movie practically falls apart once it does exactly what we knew it would, which is pair off its leads. It’s not that we’re adamant they never could be together. (Though we’re not that hot on it, either.) It’s more that Runaway Bride does very little, besides Ike becoming more compassionate the more he hears out Maggie’s commitmentphobia and the unconscious anxieties underneath it, to make the case that these two actually are a perfect match. The matchmaking is defined by its abruptness, and the abruptness is so abrupt that it almost makes us mad.
Romantic comedies lose whatever sense of fun they’d been coasting on when it comes time for feelings to be revealed and you don’t feel like those feelings and their accompanying displays of affection have been earned. Pretty Woman was contrived, too. But it had a trajectory that at least made sense. It’s harder to buy that someone who’s nationally humiliated you could be a soulmate.
Runaway Bride feels like it had a couple pivotal scenes taken out. I did laugh at the reveal that Ike and Maggie’s nuptials are being covered like a media event: the church swarms with hundreds of onlookers making bets; food stands and merch tables set up shop for the day. But after doing that laughing I settled into indifference toward what’s supposed to be suspense around whether Maggie will leave Ike at the altar like all her other men. I wanted to feel at least a little of what that hungry public was, but Runaway Bride, so illogical and unfocused, made me feel nothing.
Peterson Reviews 