Is the Rom-Com Dead?

‘J eez, just look at them,” marveled my brother as we plunked down at the screening for writer-director Ol Parker’s Ticket to Paradise and gazed up at the glowing still of George Clooney and Julia Roberts on the big screen. “What do you think? The new Tracy and Hepburn?” Well, maybe. Clooney and Roberts are definitely both beloved movie stars and old pros, and they know how to put grown-up chemistry across, even if they don’t exactly burn up the screen. But Tracy and Hepburn made a whole bunch of movies together, and they weren’t all classics of the form. Adam’s Rib, this isn’t — except maybe in its use of a couple of professional types (Clooney’s David is an architect, Roberts’s Georgia is an art dealer) whose marriage takes a beating. In this case, there were five years and a daughter before things went bust, and that’s the high concept here: Now the daughter has gone and fallen in love while on a post-college summer sojourn in Bali, and they both want to stop her from making the sort of impetuous-young-thing mistake that they did.

The account of their own post-college engagement is related via carefully timed cuts between his version and hers. It’s a solid introduction to the characters, but right away, Clooney gets the better of things: His narration may be tinged with vanity, but Roberts’s suffers from a whiff of contempt. The former may, in small doses, serve as part of one’s charm; the latter is just off-putting. And charm is the point here, the overwhelming force that Parker needs to carry you through the frequently sloppy storytelling. The charm of Julia Roberts flashing her famous smile and having to accept a translated compliment about looking like a very attractive horse. The charm of someone referring to Georgia’s new boyfriend as “an upgrade” over grumpy, graying but still George Clooney–handsome David. The anti-glamour of Pretty Woman in a twill jumpsuit; the goofiness of Danny Ocean drunkenly jumping around on the dance floor. Charming!

Sometimes, it’s enough, as when the animosity first begins to fade between our impossibly beautiful exes. Hooray, Mommy and Daddy aren’t fighting anymore, even if it’s unclear why! Other times, it’s more awkward: for instance, we’re told that daughter Lily is set to start a career as a lawyer at a prestigious law firm at summer’s end. It’s not a throwaway plot point: She’s worried about letting down her parents by abandoning her career opportunity for life as a wife. And she has reason to worry. Mom gave up a job offer to marry Dad, and to this day, she resents him for diminishing what she does for a living. (“What you do diminishes what you do,” he quips.) Dad, meanwhile is convinced that Lily shares her mother’s ambition and won’t stick around as the helpmate of a seaweed farmer — even one who’s terribly handsome and just signed a deal with Whole Foods. “Nothing lasts forever,” he warns fiancé Gede. “Enjoy this until she ends it. And don’t have kids.” But it’s pretty clear she’s just graduated from college, not law school, and she comes off more as a confused kid than a striver just about to grasp the brass ring. (Hence her slacker roommate, fellow traveler, and comic sidekick Wren, who preps for the trip by counting out a generous stack of condoms from her Trojan Pleasure Pack.) She isn’t throwing it all away; she’s just getting started. (She might have agonized over her decision a little more if she’d just passed the bar exam, but then, the film isn’t about her.)

Parker gets some additional help from his setting: Much is made over Bali’s beauty, and rightly so. Tropical island paradises still look great on screen, just like movie stars. It’s likely that every vacationer who actually lands there spends a drowsy minute wondering why they don’t just chuck everything and stay. And in Lily’s case, there’s a whole community eager to welcome her; the seaweed farm is an extended-family business on the beach, full of laughing children and smiling elders, steeped in tradition and stability. A far cry from her own broken home. But then, the film isn’t about them, either, and so Parker feels the need to slip in little defenses of the modern American life that Lily is rejecting, stuff about couples not needing family, only each other, about not starting a family too young, about Mom being the best when she just simply wasn’t. Because otherwise, our protagonists might have to endure a harsher reckoning than they do. And where’s the charm in that?

All this is not to say that there isn’t any drama here. David and Georgia are people who saw their romantic dreams go up in smoke, who have spent years hating each other, and who agree to cooperate only to prevent their awful history from repeating itself. The problem is that the movie is much more interested in the comedy of the rom-com than in the romance, but the setup demands something a little more serious than a sabotaged ring ceremony and its ensuing complications. Adam’s Rib had a murder trial as its backdrop; come to think of it, so did His Girl Friday, another great movie about divorced folk flirting with matrimonial restoration. There was real weight to the conflict, real venom behind the faux-cheerful zingers. Ticket to Paradise offers feints in that direction but never drives the blade home.