‘Runaway Bride’ or — No Motion Picture?

I was round at my mum’s last night and after dinner we decided to watch a movie. “Hey!” I declared in the midst of a seemingly increasingly futile option scroll, “There’s ‘Runaway Bride’. A friend of mine says that’s worth watching purely for Rupert Everett’s performance as Julia Roberts’ best friend alone.” We put it on.

However, it was only as the opening credits rolled that I realised I had possibly made a terrible mistake as it wasn’t ‘Runaway Bride’ (1999) where Rupert Everett plays Julia Roberts’ best friend but ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ (1997). Uh-oh. How could I, a self-confessed expert in the comedy sub-genre of the wedding-centric rom-com, have made such a massive error? Then I consoled myself with the reminder that I’m not an expert in the comedy sub-genre of the wedding-centric rom-com but, more accurately, a connoisseur of the comedy sub-sub-genre of the wedding-centric rom-com SET ON A TROPIC ISLAND, and there’s a distinct and radical difference between the two (a good comparison is how Philip Glass and Steve Reich are both, technically, Minimalist composers yet their music is based on radically different mathematical systems and structures. It’s exactly the same thing here).

Well, let’s give it a try anyway. How bad can it be?

The film begins by living up to its name with Julia Roberts riding a horse through sun-kissed countryside accompanied by some incredibly on-the-nose and profoundly dull and banal pop music*.

We then cut to New York City where we discover Richard Gere is a misogynistic newspaper columnist who decides to write a story about Roberts’ habit of ditching her grooms at the altar which, not surprisingly, makes Roberts furious. Roberts complains resulting in Gere losing his job after which he travels to Roberts’ rural hometown to cover the run-up to her latest wedding figuring that, if she bails on this one too, he’ll be vindicated.

So, would it spoil the movie if I told you that in the course of events Gere and Roberts grudgingly get to know each other, gradually fall in love and, ultimately, get married to each other? Of course not, because ‘Runaway Bride’ has a story so glaringly obvious in its outcome, so screamingly predictable in its ultimate terminus, that it doesn’t exist as a flowing narrative or a Where-Could-All-This-Be-Possibly-Going? romance but purely as a sort of fixed point in ‘three dimensional rom-com space’ that’s utterly impervious to any of the unexpected rotational or transformational forces that make these films watching in the first place.

It’s not a movie; it’s a piece of religious iconography devoted to the blessed images of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts suspended in a semi-luminous formaldehyde solution giving it a strong resemblance to the work of Damien Hirst, which, not surprisingly, leaves the viewer wondering if a more accurate title for ‘Runaway Bride’ might’ve been ‘The Physical Impossibility of Watching a Decent Movie in the Mind of Someone Living’. And this suspension liquid (for all the title’s implied sense of motion this is an explicitly turbulence-free zone) consists of a phase transitioned condensation of everything America tells itself was great about the 1990’s before everything “went wrong” (Gere gazes at Roberts with all the silky allure of a Bill Clinton saxophone solo and she responds by emitting a pre-9/11 glow).

Having said all that, it’s not bloody awful. After it was over my mum and I turned to each other and said “That was fairly pleasant”. The problem is, that all it was: pleasant, cute and reasonably entertaining on a sort of homeopathic level but it’s just not terribly funny and all rather insipid. How could this be?

Then, as the closing credits rolled, the first name that appeared was — Directed by Garry Marshall. Ah! Now it all makes sense as Marshall would go on to become the world expert in the comedy sub-sub-sub-genre of wedding-centric rom-coms set during a festive holiday period. But that’s a whole other area of rom-com scholarship that’s totally beyond my understanding and would require even more references to advanced mathematics, geometric hyperplanes and complex fluid dynamics to explain.

* U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.