She’s the One

(Edward Burns, USA, 1996)

I had a strange experience with this very 1990s romantic comedy. It was a film I enjoyed a good deal while watching it; I laughed quite a lot. Immediately on stepping out of the theatre, however, I realised that I intensely disliked it. How did this happen?

Here is a movie that seems to take you only part of the way along the path it opens up: it cops out on many levels, and goes for the easy feelings and resolutions. Endings can really screw things up in cinema!

Perhaps I wanted it to be more of a hybrid of comedy and drama than writer-director-actor Edward Burns intended. I craved a romantic screwball comedy with just an edge of pain, humiliation and complexity – a volatile brew I can really enjoy in popular cinema, for instance in Cross My Heart (Armyan Bernstein, 1987).

But She’s the One is a more down-the-line number devoted strictly, by the end, to its feel-good vibe.

The first third of the story is quite enthralling. It has an intimate, chamber-comedy structure, alternating between various pairings of its many characters – slowly unravelling their complex and sneaky inter-relationships.

Early on, Burns flags a few intriguing themes – potentially troublesome, unmanageable, thrilling themes for this genre, such as the problems of sexual appetite and frustration; the threat of losing vitality and staying in a relationship rut; and the impulsive possibilities that break apart all these impasses and frustrations in a suddenly explosive way.

Among the cast is Jennifer Aniston from Friends [1994-2004]. That connection made me think of a number of similar lifestyle situation-comedies, including Seinfeld [1989-1998] and Ellen [1994-1998]. All are largely sexless, friendship-obsessed series that gaily flit past every serious issue and complication. Friendship rather than love; friendship that is better than love – more lasting, dependable and true. And definitely less painful than love. It’s a central platform in the world-view of what is known as the comedy of manners (which I discuss in a chapter of my first book, Phantasms).

In She’s the One some things happen that, initially at least, disturb this sexless Utopia of life-just-going-on. There is a problem in the marriage between Renee (Aniston) and Francis (Mike McGlone) – they are not having sex, and while he keeps muttering darkly and rather unconvincingly about their inevitable “down cycle”, he nonetheless baulks at the notion that his wife will need to run off to the bathroom with a vibrator to relieve her tensions. Later, we learn something else that is relevant to this marital malaise: Francis is having an affair with sultry, high-flying Heather (Cameron Diaz).

Heather happens to be the old flame of Francis’ brother, Mickey (Burns). This chap appears to have withdrawn from all romantic liaisons since his traumatic bust-up with her. But now something amazing and unexpected happens to him: he picks up Hope (Maxine Bahns) in his cab, and, over the course of a few days that we do not see, they get instantly acquainted … and married.

A great deal more happens in this plot, including complications involving another, previous lover of Heather, and the problems that Mickey and Francis’ father is having in his marriage – that gruff, lovable figure is played by John Mahoney [1940-2018] from another sit-com, Friends spin-off Frasier [1993-2004, revival 2023], and before that, the splendid teen-romance Say Anything … (Cameron Crowe, 1989).

Intriguingly, neither Heather’s older man, nor the boys’ mother, are anywhere to be glimpsed in this film. There is cleverness in this tactic, but also an evasiveness, a sleight-of-hand.

As a general rule, Burns as director tends to back away from the richest implications of his material – as in his previous film, The Brothers McMullen (1995). In both, he takes a dim view of adultery and, particularly, of the women who tempt men away from home and hearth and into the fires of passion. Éric Rohmer certainly entertains more sophisticated views of this type of relationship surprise/crisis in his films.

Also unlike Rohmer’s films, Burns’ comedies tend to be rather depressingly male-centred. It is a measure of his limitations as an artist and storyteller that he gives the women in his cast much less to work with than the men. It is always the guys who are the indelible, irascible, more complex, most likeable figures – even when (or maybe because) they are total scoundrels.

Burns can’t give the rapport between men and women much spark, either. There’s never much sense, for instance, of what really constitutes this instant, incredible love between Mickey and Hope. So, naturally, you do not feel that anything is being threatened when danger arises.

I had a problem with the Woody Allen factor in this film – i.e., Allen considered as a prime practitioner of the romantic comedy of manners. Today, it seems that every creative American comedian with a narcissistic streak must pay homage to Allen. Just as Allen staked his turf exclusively in the white, middle-class, Jewish belt of Manhattan, Edward Burns is clearly laying claim to the Irish-Catholic lifestyle: largely lower middle-class and overwhelmingly male in its tribal constitution.

There is another echo of Friends and Seinfeld here: these happy little communities of pals or family members tend to be extraordinarily smug and insulated in social terms, very mono-cultural – and proud of it, too. This doesn’t stop me from laughing at the jokes, but it does ultimately make me wonder …

Allen’s influence on Burns is evident elsewhere, too, particularly on the level of film craft. The style here is as flat, artless and clunky as in the worst of Allen. It is left up to the actors to make scenes as interesting and charming as they possibly can. It’s a general tendency: in the mid ‘90s wave of romantic comedies about gorgeous, effusive twenty-somethings, it is the actors more than the director (or writer-director) who create whatever style, energy and tension there is on screen.

Burns does attempt some novelty on other levels, especially that of narrative shape and form (the same goes for Allen, in hit-and-miss fashion). Like another comedy of the same year by a young writer-director-actor, Eric Schaeffer’s If Lucy Fell, She’s the One offers pleasing symmetries between characters, disarming reversals of plot, and cartoonish games with repeating-varying situations.

There are echoes here of old masters of screwball and romantic comedy, like Frank Tashlin and Ernst Lubitsch. But when he plays these games, Burns may not at all be thinking of classics like Lubitsch’s Design for Living (1933), or Tashlin’s Susan Slept Here (1954). He may only be thinking, I fear, of Allen and Annie Hall (1977) – which is not a bad place to begin pondering romance in the movies. But it is certainly not where I would want the quest to end.

MORE Burns: Flight of the Phoenix

© Adrian Martin November 1996