Having seen the trailer for the Ken Kwapis’ cast-of-a-thousand stars self help book dramatization He’s Just Not That Into You many, many times (I watch a lot of SoapNET, Lifetime and, uh, MSNBC), I felt reasonably certain going in that I knew exactly what kind of film it was going to be: a wacky, light romantic comedy of mating manners, set in an alternate universe in which otherwise cosmopolitan adults can’t figure out how to use MySpace, and in which all normal and abnormal interpersonal neuroses and difficulties with intimacy are transposed into total paralysis over text messaging. I hope that someday soon, someone in Hollywood makes the film that He’s Not That Into You Was advertised as, because that’s sounds like the exact kind of science fiction that I really enjoy. But He’s Not That Into You is definitely not that film. The question is: what the hell is it?
That Into You fails to fit neatly into assumptions bred by its advertising and its genre makes it somewhat more interesting, if only because it forces us to contend with it what our expectations actually are when we go to see a romantic comedy, and what it would actually mean to subvert them. Screenwriters Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein seem to be very aware of contemporary romantic comedy conventions, as well as a certain tradition of final inning moral clean-up that dates back to the very earliest examples of the genre produced under the Hayes Code. But they have no interest in depriving a mass audience of the crack hit of cinematic junk food that they were promised by the promos. The film’s ultimate willingness to pander to expectation may make it a disappointment on a critical level, but I’m not sure making the audience conscious of the way their guilty pleasure works before giving it to them is something for which the filmmakers should be reprimanded.
The underlying theoretical tenet of Into You is that women spend their whole lives in a state of wishful delusion, and that this is largely the fault of other women. Mothers and teachers tell us before we can read that boys who hit us and pick on us actually love us. In adult female friendships, we’re generally too polite (and/or scared) to puncture a friend’s “but don’t you think he’ll call?” fantasies when we know her phone isn’t going to ring. These universal anxieties are channeled on screen by a young copywriter named Gigi, played by Ginnifer Goodwin. Like many young women, Gigi is so concerned with the minutia of “signs”, the nonexistent meaning that she reads into a man’s every gesture and inflection, that though she’s constantly worked up into a frenzy over one potential love or another, she’s completely out of touch with what it feels like to … feel.
So far, so good! But then, whilst stalking a blind date who never called, Gigi meets a bartender (Justin Long) who tells her that everything she thinks she knows about men is wrong. And then Gigi’s 40-something coworker (Jennifer Aniston) breaks up with her boyfriend because he says he doesn’t believe in marriage. And then her other 40-something coworker (Jennifer Connelly) becomes obsessed with the idea that her dudely husband (Bradley Cooper) has been secretly smoking, yet is oblivious to the fact that he’s actually been secretly sleeping with an unabashed temptress (Scarlett Johannsson), whose seduction of the married man has been encouraged by her hippie-flower friend (Drew Barrymore), who also helps the mistress fend off the advances of the guy who plays the manager on Entourage, who is also the blind date that our original heroine was moved to stalk. I’m fairly certain there are seven or eight other stars that I’m forgetting who are also tangled in this web of sexual intrigue, but the only one I remember is Luis Guzman, who has one very funny scene, and who doesn’t have sex with anyone (unfortunately). Though not more than two hours, Into You feels twice as long, even as plotlines have clearly been truncated and scenes redacted in the interest of brevity.
It must be said that in illustrating these tangles, Into You is tougher, slower, less interested in easy laughs and much more patiently talky than you’d expect it to be, and even when that “talk” reads clearly as lines straight off the self-help page, the film’s unflinching attention to paranoia and misery is, in its way, refreshing.
But it might be easier to take Into You seriously as a sincere statement on contemporary life and dating rituals if it wasn’t so hard to confuse its imagery with a “Stars — they’re just like US!” spread in US Weekly. There are so many celebrities in this thing that it’s impossible to think of the celestial presences on screen as characters; either each actor has been cast with laser-guided precision for what they best bring, or else there is no acting in this picture whatsoever. And in the case of some of the actors, there’s such a blurring between certain aspects of the character and certain aspects of the persona of the star who plays them, that it almost has to be intentional.
Most glaringly: Jennifer Aniston steps out of a Lonely Jen spread and into a plot that has her walking away from her boyfriend of seven years (Ben Affleck, full of the moldability, desperation to please yet reticence to marry that the tabloids would have us believe marked his relationship with Jennifer Lopez). Aniston’s character eventually, improbably gets her happy ending in the final reel, but the bulk of the film is about watching her be alone and miserable while everyone around her tells her there’s something wrong with her because she’s not married. Whatever kind of pleasure it is that people get from consuming that tabloid image of a terminally unlucky-in-love Jennifer Aniston, that pleasure is pumped directly into this film.
In fact, throughout Into You, the pleasures offered are not conventionally pleasurable at all. We’ve been talking quite a bit lately about comedies of uncomfortability — films which don’t seek to provoke laughs through “jokes” or traditional laugh lines as much as they seek to provoke squirming, and laughter comes as a by-product of the squirms. Instead of laugh lines, Into You has gasp lines –– scenes continually build up to a narrative revelation or statement of raw honesty that seem designed to elicit an audible intake of air from the audience –– and the laughs come as a by-product of the gasps. Sometimes, as in a scene where Jennifer Connolly’s repressed anger over her husband’s affair comes to the surface, Into You will strain for absolute seriousness for a genuinely uncomfortable length of time, and then break the mood with a single joke, in a “just playin’” concession to the audience.
But there’s no greater audience concession than those final-reel happy endings. For much of its running time, Into You is very –– how to put it –– European in its attitudes towards sex, infidelity, and commitment, in that it allows people to be people and to make the mistakes that real people realistically make. And for a while, it seems like the point of the thing is to suck you into the tropes of movie love, only to throw those tropes in your face. But in the end, the cheaters and seducers are punished, and anyone who isn’t on a one-way track to an airtight marriage ends up alone. This screwball dramedy –– in which a plucky girl with bobbed, wavy hair talks fast and moves fast and gets her man in the end –– hews to the exact pattern of the post-Code romance of Classical Hollywood, in which the last few minutes of the film would be devoted to restoring the moral social order torn asunder by working women (career girls and girls of the night alike), economic desparation (represented here by Johansson’s character, who lives in a one-room apartment and wears raggy hair extensions and ill-fitting, ripped jeans which are perhaps suppossed to look sexy, but actually make her look like a street urchin), and the torments of the ego.
Into You, of course, doesn’t go for the last-minute turnaround in order to fit to a censorship code –– although today’s romantic films are so homogenously safe in their vision of morality that the Hayes Office could reopen without incident. No, Into You gives everyone sudden magic rosy endings because it understands who its audience is, and that ultimately, that audience doesn’t come to the movies to get their expectations subverted. They don’t want to think about the way the world works, or the way movies work, while sitting in front of that screen; they come to the movies to sink in the fantasy that It Could Happen To Them. He’s Just Not That Into You is smart for what it is, but it refuses to be condescendingly smarter than the people it exists to please. And that makes it even smarter.
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