Return with me momentarily to the apartment of Mary Richards, single successful career girl of the 70s. Our heroine is explaining the birds and the bees to her landlady’s daughter, Bess, who wants to know if loving a boy means you have to have sex with him. No, no, no, Mary shouts as she jumps out of her seat, frantically waving her spaghetti arms: sex and love are two different things. Contented, Bess wanders away to watch Saturday-morning cartoons, but Mary soon has second thoughts about how she handled the situation. Her best friend, Rhoda, consoles her. Don’t worry, Mare, she says. “I don’t know what you did for the kid, but I think you just changed my life.”
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“I wanna be a gentleman,” says Mike, the sweetly stumbling hero who can’t seem to get the women he meets off the friendship track and into the bedroom. “You gotta get off this respect thing,” counsels his buddy Trent. Himself a cool, confident hit with the ladies—or, as he refers to them, the “babies”—Trent is on a mission to make Mike more successful with women, to drag him out of the celibate funk he’s been in since his girlfriend of six years dumped him. He must persuade Mike to stop being such a gentleman and to start thinking of women as bunny rabbits: unthinking, inarticulate creatures—prey, essentially, or, to use one of the script’s many colorful locutions, “tasty skanks.”
On a quick trip to Las Vegas and later at a series of retro-hip LA nightspots, Mike tries to switch over to Trent’s scavenger school of babe management. He fails in a variety of embarrassing ways. Then Mike decides to just be himself, and voila! Mike gets a girl. And not just any girl: he gets a girl with a distinctly 1940s-ish name (Lorraine), a girl who pulls her hair back in two combs a la Dorothy Lamour, a girl with seams up the back of her stockings, a girl who knows how to swing dance. An old-fashioned girl, one might say, except for the fact that she asks him to dance.
Like Diner, Beautiful Girls would have us believe being a guy is hard, confusing, nay, downright torturous. Not Swingers. Here is pure exuberance, without all that messy nostalgic yearning. Here is a movie unafraid to come right out and showcase the sheer idiot joy involved in being a boy among boys, a movie brave enough to show what we girls have been silently suspecting all along: not only is it not hard to be a boy, it’s actually quite a lot of fun.
Like his charismatic cousin, Trent is fated to lose his cool when he loses his command over language: he thinks a “baby” talking baby talk and making strange faces at him in a diner is putting the moves on him, but the woman is actually attempting to entertain her infant. In an instant, the goofy grin is gone. Mike, who like Sal Paradise has held out for sex and love together—for a girl with whom it is possible to rest one’s soul—is thoroughly vindicated, and big bad daddy Trent is revealed for what he really is: a big baby.
Directed by Doug Liman
Written by Jon Favreau
With Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, and Patrick Van Horne.
