Charm Overcomes Comic Anarchy at U.S. Box Office

It will be a good thing if the Sandra Bullock romantic comedy The Proposal continues its box-office success–if Hollywood draws the right conclusions about why it did well.

The film had a rather surprisingly strong opening weekend at the U.S. box office, finishing on top of the heap with a take of $34.1 million in North American ticket sales.

It’s the first film starring Sandra Bullock in a decade to reach number one. Men accounted for a healthy 37 percent of the audience, according to Reuters. The film’s trailers and commercials strongly established the film as a by-the-books romantic comedy centered on a distinctly meager and unoriginal comic premise: female executive fakes engagement to her assistant in order to escape deportation (she’s from Canada). When she takes him to meet her family, hilarity ensues.

Obviously that’s recycled from Green Card and numerous recent romcoms such as Meet the Parents, but the routine nature of the film’s concept may actually be a very good sign. In Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930s and ’40s, plots were routinely recycled and varied in amazingly minute ways, yet the wit of the writing, the appeal of the performers, and the understated competence of the direction made the resulting films quite appealing and still enjoyable today.

The Proposal is a clear throwback to that approach, though in a more vulgar contemporary cultural context. Unfortunately, the latter works greatly against the film, though first-weekend audiences wouldn’t have known that, as the trailers and commercials for the film presented it as a charmer. But in the actual film, Bullock’s character is decidedly unlikeable, and only Bullock’s inherent sweetness rescues the character from being a horror.

Bullock’s appeal has always been far from glamor or sensuality; instead she has typically projected in her performances a sense of kindness, intelligence, and fundamental decency. In addition, costar Ryan Reynolds fits well in this film as a clean-cut romantic lead for the likable Bullock. Reynolds’ evident personal charisma keeps his character from appearing to be an awful wimp in the early sequences.
Thus it seems evident that the producers realized that mean-spiritedness would not be a good selling point for the movie, and they took steps to mitigate it in the casting and public relations. Hence it’s interesting that The Proposal and the brilliant, positive Pixar film Up finished first and third while the very successful raunchy comedy The Hangover and the newly released raunchy comedy Year One finished second and fourth.

If the initial success of The Proposal holds up for a solid theatrical run–it won’t be number one this weekend with the release of the second Transformers film, but can still do well if Bullock and Reynolds have sufficiently overcome the meanness and cliches of the screenplay and thus audience word of mouth is positive–perhaps it can help establish a trend toward greater charm, wit, and decency in romantic comedies.

More of that in Hollywood’s output would be quite welcome.