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'Must Love Dogs': Predictable, sweet romantic comedy
Palm Beach Post
News flash: Lloyd Dobler and Cherry Valance are in love!
If you're not of a certain age — roughly between 28 and 40 — then Must Love Dogs might seem like a predictable but sweet rom-com starring one of America's Sweethearts and that nice Under The Tuscan Sun lady.
Warner Brothers Pictures
The verdict: You must like Must Love Dogs. Maybe not love, but like. Director: Gary David Goldberg On the web |
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If you are Gen-X-ish, however, your cinematic worldview was probably indelibly affected, either for better or worse, by John Cusack's Say Anything (1989) and Diane Lane's The Outsiders (1993), both released in my sweet, gullible, formative years.
Say Anything taught me that the way to your beloved's heart is holding a boombox outside her bedroom window in the middle of the night, that writing 63 songs about your ex-boyfriend is a tad obsessive, and that kickboxing is, indeed, the sport of the future.
And from The Outsiders, I learned that street-rumbling bad boys have a deep, abiding pain that makes them leather-wearing catnip to good girls, that saving kids from burning churches is for suckers, and that Robert Frost poetry can teach the importance of "staying gold," but will never, ever make you prettier than Rob Lowe.
Most importantly, those movies made me lifelong fans of Cusack, after whom I named my late cat, and of Lane, whom I wanted to be because she got to stand next to Matt Dillon.
They were both likable and gorgeous in a non-threatening, ordinary way. They were both my adolescent stand-ins — Say Anything's lovable Lloyd was the trench-coated outsider who charmed the smart, popular girl just by being himself, while The Outsiders' Cherry was, like Natalie Wood before her, the good girl who becomes a smitten kitten over some guy who's absolutely, positively up to no good.
So even though the enjoyable Must Love Dogs is the same predictable but sweet romantic comedy you knew it was, it's also a sign that our generational icons have come full circle. They're not teenagers anymore, and neither are we. In a lot of ways, they're sort of playing the same people, but as gun-shy 40-somethings.
Like Lloyd, the recently divorced Jake (Cusack) is a wordy romantic whose cutey-cute nice guy thing is hot. But his stream-of-consciousness intensity can make him seem, on a good day, overeager, and on a bad day, well, crazy.
And Sarah (Lane), like Cherry, is a really nice person who seems drawn to the wrong guy. Although in this case, the wrong guy is an ex-husband who cheated on her, and not a juvenile delinquent from Oklahoma who winds up on the wrong end of a barrage of police gunfire.
Neither of them feel anywhere near ready to date again. But both are signed up, in a ridiculously neat Hollywood way, for an online dating service called PerfectMatch.com, by concerned/overly nosy friends or relatives.
Notice that I'm saying ridiculously neat, but not completely unlikely. Being from a big, nosy family, I don't think they'd actually sign me up without my knowledge, but I and my singleness have been the subject of discussion both in and out of my presence.
And my father actually encouraged me to re-up my membership on a certain online lurve site, either because he wants me to take a chance on love or because he really wants grandchildren while he's young enough to make them watch The Transporter with him over and over.
Anyway, Jake and Sarah have an awkward first meeting at a dog park, during which he feels immediate chemistry and she feels he's sweet with a touch of that crazy psycho boy. But he calls her again, and they embark on a tentative, funny, sexy romance that's a joy to watch, even with some movie-goofy misunderstandings, a stock Third Wheel (Dermot Mulroney) and a cutesy ending so unlikely that somewhere Meg "Unlikely Romantic Comedy Ending" is thinking about how much more plausible it was when she fell in love with Tom Hanks, even after he put her dead mama's bookstore out of business.
Speaking of You've Got Mail (which I try never to do), Must Love Dogs has a more realistic handle on online dating, and seems to accept that people don't just e-chat because they're hideously deformed, agoraphobic or concealing their true identity as the man trying to put your mama's bookstore out of business.
Sure, you get some duds, but Ye Olde Local Pub is chock full of nuts, too.
And the movie doesn't make people who are old enough to own vinyl records seem pathetic for wanting to find love.
Stockard Channing plays the sassy, trailer-dwelling paramour of Sarah's widower father (the still handsome Christopher Plummer), and at first you're like "Eh, blowsy stereotype."
But she has a heartbreaking but empowering scene where she declares, rather than asks permission for, her right not to be alone, and not to feel bad about it.
Did I mention that Channing, Lane and Elizabeth Perkins, who plays Sarah's over-involved sister, all appear with their laugh lines and fetching signs of age intact? Of course, they're still prettier than you. But it's a start.
The Flick Chick's Bottom Line: You must like Must Love Dogs. Maybe not love, but like.
