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Reviews:
It’s
Funny Because It’s…Good
by Michael Flanagan
Super
John Cusack once again proves he
has great taste in women with Serendipity.
Perhaps the most underrated king of romantic
comedies, Cusack has lived and loved and lost and won
more times than the entire cast of “Friends” put
together. He’s
loved Julia Robers in America’s Sweethearts,
he’s loved, lost, and won the beautiful Iben Hjejle
in High Fidelity, he’s…done something with
Dianne Weist in Bullets Over Broadway, and
he’s even loved John Malkovich in Being John
Malkovich. Now,
he loves Kate Beckinsale, who, regardless of how she
appears in Pearl Harbor, is actually a smart,
attractive woman and a good actor to boot.
The best part of Cusack’s love
for Beckinsale is that it’s brief.
Not that his character only loves her character
briefly, but the movie itself is a little under an
hour and a half.
And in that short amount of time, there is
little drama, very few tears, and almost no
unnecessary tragic, emotional
violin-playing-heartstrings cat-howls. And that’s the way it should be.
If you haven’t noticed, romantic comedies do
not have the following words in the name: “epic,”
“tragic,” “dramatic,” “powerful,” or
“intermission.”
No, believe it or not they consist of only two
words: “romantic” and “comedy.”
That’s all.
And that’s all they should be.
Serendipity is both
romantic and comedic; it achieves both levels early in
the film, and holds them throughout.
When Cusack sees two people about to have sex
and mistakenly believes it’s the woman of his dreams
who he’s been searching for since the last time he
saw her seven years ago, he doesn’t cry or drink or
give a monologue on the hardships of love. No, he lays on the grass, shrugs, and then crawls away,
depressed as only John Cusack can be, but coming to a
plot-driving conclusion that helps to easily wrap up
the movie. Relationships
end in this film, but no tears are shed.
Friends are lied to, but they make up in less
time than the lies took to tell.
This is a happy movie, a “feel-good”
picture, as they say, and it doesn’t try to be
anything more. Cusack
and Beckinsale have good, but plot-restricted
chemistry, and you root for them to get together.
And here’s the thing: you don’t stop
rooting. Nothing
happens in this movie to make you think, “Well,
maybe they don’t belong together,” or, “Gee,
since they’ve gotten back together and broken up
three times in one movie, maybe it just shouldn’t
work out.” No,
in this film, and this shouldn’t be a spoiler, but
it may be if you’ve never seen a real romantic
comedy, when they get together, it’s only once, in
the nicely done, well-filmed and well-written
conclusion.
And like all romantic comedies
should, it ends with a kiss and a laugh…and Eugene
Levy.
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