Try on some dresses with Rye Silverman as he reviews the new romantic comedy from the screenwriter of the Devil Wears Prada, 27 Dresses
I’ll admit it. Despite being a somewhat cynical, heterosexual male, I do have a soft spot for romantic comedies. I am certainly willing to shoot down the ones that are absolute crap, such as Kate and Leopold, or Maid in Manhattan, but I also have a very hard time turning You’ve Got Mail off when it comes on my HBO. So armed with a light, since-Roswell crush on Katharine Heigl and a close lesbian friend who serves as a great fake girlfriend, I found myself at a screening of 27 Dresses, the new romantic comedy from writer Aline Brosh McKenna.
The movie has not been very well reviewed, and I went in with very low expectations. With that in mind I did enjoy it. I have not been very impressed with the slate of RomComs that have been dumped on us in the past few years, with such absolute drivel as Must Love Dogs and A Lot Like Love, but I was able to enjoy 27 Dresses despite a couple of script errors, and the blatant even to me anti-feminist notion that the importance of its protagonist as a person seems entirely wrapped up in whether or not she can find herself a husband. An odd contrast from McKenna’s previous film, the adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, which commented on the struggle of women to hold power without isolating themselves from human connection.
A few things are out of whack in the script; I am willing to overlook the flawed logistics of the opening sequence where Heigl hires a cab to commute her between two simultaneous weddings, as it is an effective way of showing us the lengths she will go to in an effort to give every bride she knows what they need for their weddings. However, one major plot point of the movie is that Marsden, as a writer for the “Commitments” section of a popular newspaper, attends weddings and interviews the bridal parties for his column, yet Heigl, the maid of honor at a wedding he is writing about in the beginning, does not know who he is when they meet. Also, Heigl’s character is painted as having basically no social life, being at the beck and call of her boss whom she secretly loves, yet she apparently knows enough people to have been the maid of honor or at least a very involved bridesmaid in 27 weddings so far. Where exactly did she meet all these other women, when it seems her only friend in the world is the perennial best-friend Judy Greer (brilliant, as always, I should add.)
The reason why it does work is the chemistry between Heigl and the male romantic lead James Marsden, who I am rarely a fan of, which is an actual believable romantic connection, unlike the attempted chemistry between original object of Heigl’s affection, Edward Burns, and her sister played by the human bobblehead doll Malin Akerman (seriously, what school of acting did she go to that taught her your head must always move whilst talking?) As much as I am a fan of Burns, I really only think he works as a tough Irish cop or taxi driver, and always seems to fall short as someone who is supposed to actually be loveable.
The movie makes use of two way over-done RomCom staples, that being the clothing-montage and the group singing scene, yet somehow they both work and do more than just fill time between banter. I will confess to being something of a sucker for an earned sing-along scene; I will defy any one to try and shake my love of a bus full of 70’s musicians singing Tiny Dancer, and indeed I quite enjoyed this movie’s rendition of Benny and the Jets. The sing along scene, which takes place in an upstate New York dive-bar, also contains perhaps my favorite extras in any movie ever, so noticeable in how much they are enjoying the singing of Marsden and Heigl that I began to watch them more than the leads.
One thing the movie does that I found myself very impressed by is that in the climax, our protagonist does something that is absolutely wrong of her to do, regardless of how awful her sister is. Typically in a movie such as this, a move in the same part of the script is something done with the best intentions or even more often, as is the case of most Ben Stiller movies
, the result of things happening that make their own efforts fall apart, Heigl’s character does something that is nothing short of personal sabotage, and I have to give a bit of applause to McKenna for taking that direction, of making us see our heroine as someone who can actually do something cruel or manipulative and selfish without making us hate her for it.
Because of that, and stellar performances by Heigl, Marsden, Greer, and those extras, I wll give 27 Dresses a B-.