Love Happens

Wow, I forgot about this one. I actually saw it a couple weeks back, at the Carmike-down-the-block, just after I got back into town. It probably slipped my mind because the Carmike is so accessible---just a five minute walk or a thirty second car trip.

I have to admit I groaned when I first saw the trailer for Love Happens---sheesh, another romantic comedy with a cheesy title. But I like Aaron Eckhart. He's a sturdy workhorse actor who churns out multiple movies per year in a way that's impossible not to respect. Although I don't have anything against Jennifer Aniston as an actress, her choice of roles is sometimes suspect, such that her name is a bit of a flashing red light to me.

But Love Happens turns out to be slightly more palatable than I feared it would be, mostly because it is actually not a romantic comedy. Rather it's a romantic drama with a plot that has similarities to last fall's abysmal Seven Pounds. Both movies fall into the sub-genre of "widower grief" movies, about a male protagonist struggling to overcome guilt about the death of his wife.

Given that, I'll take Love Happens over Seven Pounds any day of the week, but mainly because the latter was so dreadful. Although Love Happens isn't a comedy by Hollywood genre standards, it is nevertheless one by Aristotlean standards, in that the story has a "happy" ending. Not spoilers here. One could tell that from the title, as well as the soundtrack right from the beginning.

But what I really took away from this movie, after thinking about for the last few weeks, was a deep insight into the use of deception as a plot premise in Hollywood movies. Specifically, the insight is that when all else fails, you can create story tension by the use of deception by the main character.

Deception by the protagonist is the great fairy dust of screenwriting. It can work in many, many circumstances to create a compelling narrative where there might not otherwise be one.

In this case, it works like this: a man (Eckhart) has lost his wife in a car accident. Several years later, he is still mired in grief and unable to love again. He meets a woman (Aniston) who helps him to overcome his grief and learn to love again.

By itself, this would be make a great movie---in France. But there's probably not enough story tension there to make a Hollywood movie. So what do you do? Add deception by the main character.

Thus Eckart's character is not simply a man who lost his wife, but one who is deceiving himself and the world about the circumstances of her death, and how he dealt with it. This deception becomes extended to the romance that springs up between Eckkart's character and Aniston's. This latter deception is the one that forms the essential tension in the love story, which must then be resolved, in the context of the larger emotional struggle of grief.

See how wonderful deception works as a tension-creating device in movies? It's like salt in cooking.

The title to this movie could have thus been extended: Love Happens...When Deception is Cleared Up.

A few fine points to mention here. Classical Hollywood long recognized a double standard when it comes to deception, namely that especially in romance, deception is much more forgivable by women than men. Women are somewhat expected to use some measure of deception in the courtship dance, whereas men are expected "to lay it on the line."

There's a dash of this in Love Happens. When Eckhart's character first approaches Aniston's, she mirrors his "deep deception" by a frivolous surface deception in order to push him away (by pretending to be deaf). But in this case, as in many others, we endorse this kind of thing by a woman playing hard to get against a suitor. Ironically her "mirroring" of his deceptive state is an indication here that they are well-matched as lovers.

A couple other things to mention. First off, Martin Sheen is an awesome supporting actor, a pleasure to watch anytime he is on screen. What a pro.

There's also the fact that this movie is set in Seattle. I felt somehow that this was taking advantage of the image of the city to help set the tone of the story. There is something about the Emerald City, and especially the Space Needle, that is now permanently identified with romantic melodrama because of Nora Ephron. Well, not me. I still tend to think of The Parallax View, but if you know me, you would probably have guessed that already.