The tone of your standard American romantic comedy has changed a bit since the likes of “13 Going on 30” and even “When Harry Met Sally” before that. Those films were markedly earnest, wearing their proclamations of true love on their sleeves for all to see. Of course, today’s audiences are no longer impressed when the hero of the film runs down the tarmac at an airport, madly chasing the airplane that carries his one true love away from him forever. When it comes to the clichés that have long been part of the genre, they’ve seen it all.
Today’s rom-coms are a different variation on a longstanding formula that is using essentially the same batch of ingredients, but in a different way. Whereas “When Harry Met Sally” and “Jerry Maguire” were unabashed in their sincerity, films like “Trainwreck” and “Sleeping with Other People” are gleefully glib and often mean. They’re sometimes funnier than those earlier films I mentioned, occasionally meddling on tried-and-true rom-com clichés to knowing effect before inevitably succumbing to the same plot machinations that they mock for the third act wrap-up. If you want to see an acute deconstruction of the hoary set-ups we’ve seen employed time and time again since Woody Allen wrote the playbook with “Annie Hall,” there’s always David Wain’s spoof “They Came Together,” another film with a decidedly 21st century view of modern love.
READ MORE: 25 Years After ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ Can The Rom-Com Be Saved?
Or better still, if you want a sociologically informed history of the genre’s evolution, may we suggest this recent video essay from Sight and Sound, titled “Kicking Against the Chick Flicks: Reclaiming the Hollywood Romcom.” The narrator traces how the mood and feel of the standard romantic comedy has changed over time, citing such examples as the birth of the bromance in early Judd Apatow vehicles like “Knocked Up” and “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and similarly, how much of today’s more cutting romantic comedy feels like a rebuke to the unspoken conservatism of films like “Sleepless in Seattle.” The essay mixes idiosyncratic riffs on the formula (“Obvious Child,” “Ruby Sparks”) with dire retreads of it (“Just Go With It,” “It’s Complicated”) and should prove a noteworthy primer for anyone interested in the history of this kind of film. Also, there’s footage of pre-Rust Cohle Matthew McConaughey hamming it up in “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” Who doesn’t want to see that?
