Forces of Nature
With Sandra Bullock, Ben Affleck, Maura Tierney, Steve Zahn, and Blythe Danner.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
If screwball comedy was in fact “a special kind of women’s game, nearly always favoring the heroine to win,” as critic James Harvey has written, It Happened One Night is the female sex’s first and biggest screwball victory. The film begins with Ellie Andrews, the heiress played by Colbert, taking a flying leap off the side of her father’s yacht, and it ends with her dashing joyously across the lawn of her father’s estate in a white satin wedding dress. What she’s running away from is her own lavish, utterly conventional high-society wedding. What she’s running toward is Clark Gable, a marriage filled with sex and adventure, and a world in which men and women can be equal partners in love, a world vividly described by Elizabeth Kendall in The Runaway Bride, her 1990 study of Depression-era romantic comedy.
This definition of marriage as a state of male-female equality and camaraderie, charged with sexual energy played out in witty dialogue, is the benchmark of 1930s screwball comedy. Forces of Nature, on the other hand, proves itself not merely incompatible with screwball but an active offense against it, defining marriage as a miserable, luckless state in which you don’t get to fuck anyone but your tired old slag heap of a wife.
Whenever it’s not trying to convince us that these two are in love, Forces of Nature reverts to its original antimonogamy thesis, essentially devolving into a ruthlessly bleak catalog of the horrors of the marital state. The groom’s parents bicker. The Bride’s parents are recently separated, perhaps because they disagree about Newt Gingrich–we can’t be sure. The groom, perusing a quote book to find inspiration for his wedding vows (he and the Bride are writing their own), can find only negative appraisals of the institution by wags such as Oscar Wilde. A blissfully happy, sexually fulfilled older couple sitting across the aisle from the groom on a train turns out not to be married at all: they’re simply having an affair. The nadir of these supposedly comic moments comes when a divorced stranger sitting next to the groom on a plane starts complaining about what a pain in the ass women are: after you marry them they get fat and refuse to service you sexually.
In a nutshell, this is what makes Forces of Nature such an insult to the young female audience for which it’s obviously intended: there are no heroines in it, screwball or otherwise–only brides and mothers. All this revolting movie has to offer women is the stultifying choice between being some man’s wife or some boy’s mother. No diving headfirst off your father’s yacht into the Atlantic Ocean to look for yourself. No riding on Clark Gable’s back across a moonlit stream. No liberating vision of a world where, as Harvey puts it, “we are all tough and funny and smart together, and connected because we’re free instead of stuck with one another.” Clearly I am no fan of Bullock’s chest-pounding Sarah, but both she and the Bride–as well as the Bride’s mother, the groom’s mother, and all the women in the audience who paid good money to see this movie–deserve better than this appalling travesty.
