Emerson wrote, “The only gift is a portion of thyself,” but try that one out on Valentine’s Day and you’re liable to find thyself sleeping on the sofa. Even those of us who know better have been so beaten down by commercial culture that we feel compelled to spend a certain of amount of cash to prove our love—which makes tonight one of the biggest date nights of the year and February the perfect time to release a romantic comedy. One of my all-time favorites, Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937), is playing February 18 at the University of Chicago, and you can find it just about anywhere on video; the story of a wildly antagonistic couple who divorce and then discover they can’t live without each other, it shows how the tension between a man and a woman can be as thrilling as it is uncomfortable.
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The two movies also share the same sense of humor, trying with limited success to mine laughs from the supposed differences between men and women—as opposed to the differences between a particular man and a particular woman, which are what animate The Awful Truth. The men here are interested in sports, drinking, poker, and getting laid (though not necessarily in that order); the women are interested mostly in each other, because men just don’t understand. Of course the men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus routine is as old as Lysistrata, and it’s continually reinforced by an industry that divides movies into “chick flicks” (cardboard characters, thin dialogue, personal fulfillment) and “guy movies” (cardboard characters, thin dialogue, fireballs). But it seems to get dumber and more strident as modern life erodes the differences between real men and women.
“How can you be glad to know me?” asks Jerry. “I know how I’d feel if I were sitting with a girl and her husband walked in.” Lucy replies, “I’ll bet you do.” Later Jerry shows up at her apartment while the oilman and her mother are there, and only Lucy can see his fingers crossed behind his back as he tells them, “Never did I have to ask, ‘Lucy, where have you been? What were you doing?’ I always knew.”
Andie is a male screenwriter’s idea of a perfect woman: not only does she look like Kate Hudson, but she’s smart and sassy and seems to have an endless supply of Knicks tickets. After Ben picks her up in the bar, though, she deliberately goes psycho on him, calling him obsessively, bursting into tears at the slightest provocation, decorating his apartment with teddy bears, fantasizing about their future children, and materializing at his weekly poker game to embarrass him in front of his friends. Hudson is such a talented comedienne and McConaughey such a charming straight man that they manage to wring quite a few laughs out of the setup, but the fun dissipates after Andie accompanies Ben to Staten Island to meet his family, jes’ plain folks whose warmth and acceptance provokes in her the sort of shame any decent person would have felt about ten minutes into the charade.
