The best romantic comedies often resemble pretty machines with quick wits and warm hearts. By contrast, “Runaway Bride,” the new Julia Roberts-Richard Gere love story, is a shiny bauble full of dead weight, gloppy good feeling and airless cliches. And every time you try to grab onto “Bride’s” characters, they run away.
Mindlessly adorable and gorgeously obtuse, this fancy marshmallow of a tale — about the courtship of a big-city misogynist (Gere) and a small-town neurotic (Roberts) — makes so little sense that you watch it half-believing you may have missed important explanatory scenes. Why are all these pretty people acting so stupidly? Why is the plot such a string of absurdities? Where is the missing scene that explains all this nonsense?
Most important, why does Roberts, as small-town Maryland belle Maggie Carpenter, keep walking up to the altar with various proud local wannabe grooms and then dashing away before the organist can even finish the wedding march? Is she allergic to organ music? Afraid of rice? Is she a merry prankster or an anti-marriage terrorist?
And if marriage frightens her so much, why does she start to fall for the one guy who has a super-grudge against her: cynical USA Today columnist Ike Graham (Gere), a ladykilling journalist with a devilish smile who lost his job because of an imprudent column he wrote about Maggie’s church-fleeing antics? Doesn’t she suspect his motives? Doesn’t he suspect her commitment? Why — beyond the fact that these two characters are played by big-time movie stars (and we know they’ll get together) — do they fall so blithely in love?
Though director Garry Marshall is a master at spreading veneers of likable professionalism and geniality over familiar stories and formula plots (like his TV series “The Odd Couple” and “Happy Days” or movies like “The Flamingo Kid”), he can’t work much magic here. “Runaway Bride” may superficially look like a happy reunion of sorts for Marshall, Roberts and Gere — following their previous romantic comedy hit, 1990’s “Pretty Woman,” the unlikely Hollywood Cinderella tale of a drop-dead looker-hooker and a corporate Prince Charming. But this movie is no Cinderella, even though it does have some fairytale trappings.
Like many recent movies about newspapering — including “Message in a Bottle” with its Shangri-La Chicago Tribune and “Never Been Kissed,” with its Over-the-Rainbow Sun Times — “Runaway Bride” takes place in a journalistic Never-Never Land. It gives us a USA Today whose slack standards will mystify anyone who’s ever worked as a reporter. Double-check a fact? Avoid printing barroom gossip on the front page? Ike doesn’t have to use Maggie’s real name in his column; he can disguise her identity. But not in this movie.
The fun begins when Gere’s Ike, hunting for a last-minute column, bumps into a disgruntled old flame of Maggie’s in a Manhattan bar, and then dashes off the story of her marital misadventures, with her name but without double-checking anything. (His informant has grossly exaggerated the number of her victims.) So Maggie complains and Ike gets immediately fired by his editor, Ellie (Rita Wilson) — who also happens to be his ex-wife. He then gets immediately hired to do a magazine expose on Maggie by another editor (Hector Elizondo), who happens to be his ex-wife’s new husband.
Now, you might think a writer would have some resentment about his ex-wife firing him from a high-profile job with a six-figure salary. Not in the cock-eyed world of “Runaway Bride.” There, Ike and his ex-spouse ex-editor meet after his firing to nuzzle and flirt in front of her husband, who jokes and kids with them both. Meanwhile, back in Hale, Md., Maggie’s dumped would-be husbands are on fabulously good terms with her as well, and one of them has entered the priesthood. The whole town — including Maggie’s stalwart chum Peggy (Joan Cusack) — takes her addled amours as another big, lovable joke, and they all keep showing up for the weddings. Don’t jealousy or resentment exist in Hale — or Manhattan?
Maybe not. Except for Paul Dooley as Maggie’s drunken dad, I couldn’t figure out anybody’s motivation in “Runaway Bride” — though perhaps Ike is giving us a clue when he mutters “Mayberry” on first arriving in Hale. Is life an old sitcom? Maybe this sometimes slickly charming garden party of a movie is all a dream, unreeling in the feverish mind of Hollywood screenwriters facing desperate deadlines. Writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott (“Three Men and a Little Lady,” “The Favor”) never really give us a logical explanation for Maggie’s mad flights or Ike’s big crush, even though they did have some time to work things out. (Their script sat around for 10 years before finally making it to the screen.)
In this glamorized, beautifully appointed, emotionally bizarre comedy, the motto might be: Don’t look for explanations. Just smile along with Julia; smirk along with Gere.
It’s a lovely smile and a sexy smirk, but not really enough to build a movie around. Roberts does her usual nervous princess routine, and it works as well as it always does, though she’s playing an impossible character — someone who probably, under normal circumstances, would have left her hometown years ago. As for Ike, his conversion from misogynist to Mr. Warm Fuzzies is equally baffling, however much warmth Gere puts under his roguish glances.
Exaggerated or not, “Pretty Woman” worked with audiences because it fed a typical Horatio Alger fantasy about suddenly winning the hearts of the rich, and because its supposed Hollywood hooker milieu gave it a false image of contemporary bite and sexiness. What fantasies “Runaway Bride” is trying to feed — beyond some nightmare anxiety about getting deserted at your own wedding — is hard to guess.
Most likely, writers McGibbon and Parriott simply want to spin a modern, more politically correct version of the old Hollywood standby about the courtship of a beautiful, witty couple from two different worlds. In this case, Maggie is the woman whom everyone desires but who doesn’t trust men (or marriage). And Ike is an attractive, been-around guy — famous for his woman-bashing columns — who doesn’t seem to trust women.
Should stunning good looks and mutual distrust of the opposite sex make soul mates? There’s a story in that — and maybe even a good one for Roberts, Gere and Marshall — but this movie doesn’t have it. It’s a fairytale for people hooked on bad TV, a feel-good movie that should have been left at the altar.
”RUNAWAY BRIDE”
(star) (star)
Directed by Garry Marshall; written by Josann McGibbon, Sara Parriott; photographed by Stuart Dryburgh; edited by Bruce Green; production designed by Mark Friedberg; music by James Newton Howard; produced by Ted Field, Tom Rosenberg, Scott Kroopf, Robert Cort. A Paramount Pictures-Touchstone Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:56. MPAA rating: PG.
THE CAST
Maggie Carpenter ……………….. Julia Roberts
Ike Graham …………………….. Richard Gere
Peggy …………………………. Joan Cusack
Fisher ………………………… Hector Elizondo
Ellie …………………………. Rita Wilson
Walter ………………………… Paul Dooley
