Any number of cultural observers have observed that, in recent years, the film genre of romantic comedy has been largely overtaken by movies in the style most identified with Judd Apatow. As David Denby summarizes it in the New Yorker, the story goes like this: a stoner-slacker guy whose life centers around his similarly stoner-slacker friends and for whom work and ambition are tangential at best is -- for some reason -- dating a woman who lives to work, usually in a corporate culture he has rejected, and for whom humor and relaxation are really, really low on the priority list.
When she breaks up with him, he talks his situation over with his hopeless pals, who give him bits of misogynist advice. Suddenly, it’s the end of youth for him. It’s a crisis for her, too, and they can get back together only if both undertake some drastic alteration: he must act responsibly (get a job, take care of a kid), and she has to do something crazy (run across a baseball field during a game, tell a joke). He has to shape up, and she has to loosen up.
There they are, the young man and young woman of the dominant romantic-comedy trend of the past several years—the slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow. The movies form a genre of sorts: the slacker-striver romance.
The men in these movies are typically going nowhere; if you can separate one from his pack of doofy friends, he will turn out to be funny and at least mostly sweet. But the women...
The perilous new direction of the slacker-striver genre reduces the role of women to vehicles. Their only real function is to make the men grow up. That’s why they’re all so earnest and bland—so nice, so good.
On the other hand, some more woman-centered romantic comedies have continued being made, but desperation has been the foremost characteristic of too many of the women they've been centered on -- think 27 Dresses, When in Rome, Bride Wars, He's Just Not That Into You. Denby looks back to the 1930s and 1940s for romances between characters of equal intelligence, humor, and drive, to It Happened One Night and Adam's Rib, but we don't need to look that far back to see that it's possible to make a romantic comedy in which both characters are, well, comedic, as opposed to humor being designated male.
More than perhaps any other actor working today, Drew Barrymore has played in all types of romantic comedy. Traditional ones like Music and Lyrics and Ever After; as the feminine foil to -- but holding her own against and even helping to dampen -- Adam Sandler's overweening ego in The Wedding Singer and Fifty First Dates; in the proto-slacker-striver Fever Pitch (sure, Jimmy Fallon is cute, but his character is the best a woman like her can do?); and, yes, in the wretched He's Just Not That Into You.
This year, she was in Going the Distance, which, to be blunt, pretty much flopped. Reviews were mixed and it took in less than $18 million at the box office. Which is a shame, because it may have been the best romantic comedy I've seen in a few years, and certainly one of the most interesting.
Going the Distance has many of the ingredients of a slacker-striver film: the male protagonist (played by Justin Long) has two skirt-chasing, dirty-joking, unshaven best friends, while Barrymore's character lives with her married older sister, said sister's resigned, slightly ambivalent husband, and their young daughter. His friends deliver profane advice on masturbation and sex with older women; her sister and brother-in-law are a cautionary tale of suburban married life, germophobia, and, for some reason, dry-humping.
And yet it is different, more complicated, more thoughtful. As A.O. Scott at the New York Times wrote (in the review that initially spurred me to see the film):
Romantic comedies nowadays tend to be either aggressively coarse or artificially sweet, and "Going the Distance" finds a workable middle ground, freeing its main man from obnoxious puerility and declining to turn his beloved into a latter-day career gal tripping headlong toward the altar.
The plot in a nutshell is this: Barrymore's character, Erin, meets Garrett (Long) while on a summer internship at a newspaper in New York. They like each other enough to try to make a long-distance relationship work when she goes back to finish journalism school in California, but a California-New York relationship when you don't have much money is not easy. And neither of them has prospects for a job in the other's city.
In the essentials it doesn't go that far off the beaten path: it's about young, attractive, middle-class if broke for now, heterosexual white people finding love. It's relentlessly situated in pop culture, from video games to music to movies to pub trivia. Characters talk loudly about sex in public and get in outsized fights and meet not just cute but a lot more glib than those of us who labor unscripted can aspire to.
So how is it different? Erin is invested in her work, but she's not the bland straight woman of the slacker-striver genre: in her early 30s she's still in journalism school because her career plans have already been derailed once by a relationship, and she doesn't want it to happen again. She's also funny, fun, and able to cut loose as much as anyone. Garrett, too, has a job he values (and is frustrated by), at a record label -- it's an important tweak on the slacker mold, leaving the devotion to pop culture and the ambivalence about corporate values intact, but adding a work ethic and passion. His friends are closer to the slacker model, but they're not trying to hold Garrett in slackerdom with them; in fact, at a few key moments they call him on his bullshit or push him toward change. Erin's sister is a neat freak and fiercely protective of Erin's ambitions, but she's not humorless. This isn't a movie where the boys get all the unprintable laugh lines -- Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, as Garrett's friends, go a step beyond any of the other characters, but pretty much everyone speaks in the vernacular of bar-going urban people in their early 30s.
Most of all, the movie takes seriously Erin and Garrett's dilemma. It doesn't pretend there's an easy answer to a bicoastal relationship between people trying to get started in struggling industries. It doesn't try to minimize the pain a woman like Erin might feel at being faced with the choice between career and love again after having made the wrong choice once. No one is a villain, and no one is perfect.
It is, in short, worth a look, and too few people took one when it was in theaters. Luckily, it's out on DVD now and you have a second chance.