Every so often, Film Twitter will come alive with the discourse that has plagued us for years: romantic comedies are dying! We don’t have charismatic couples anymore! Where has the tenderness gone?
And so Kat Coiro’s Marry Me is bestowed unto us, intended to be an oasis of tenderness in a desert of sterility and causticity. The premise is delightfully absurd. Jennifer Lopez plays Kat Valdez, a pop superstar. With her boyfriend Bastian (Maluma), the couple has taken the world by storm, culminating in a planned marriage ceremony during a massive concert. Mere moments before they’re meant to say “I do,” Kat discovers her intended’s infidelity, along with the rest of the world. Heartbroken and terrified at facing yet another romantic failure, she locks eyes with a stranger in the crowd: Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson), a socially awkward math teacher and divorced single father. Kat decides to marry him on the spot, and her team tries to spin this into as much positive PR as they can to drown out her public embarrassment at Bastian’s hands.
It’s a bit of a struggle to explain the film’s setup concisely, but it’s still rife with the genre’s hallmarks: two people, an introvert and an extrovert from two wildly different worlds, each with baggage from failed relationships. How could this possibly work? What follows is a mediocre film that edges towards being sincerely cute but falls short.
Marry Me has a lot of problems. One of the main ones has a name: Owen Wilson. Wilson is sleepwalking in this. None of his charm is on display, and he leaves Lopez hanging. The inciting incident, where Kat longingly stares into Charlie’s eyes and declares she’ll marry him, is embarrassing to watch. Charlie later explains he only went through with the marriage because he felt bad for Kat and was compelled to help her in her hour of need, but none of this is conveyed by his blank stare that persists throughout the entire scene. Kat could be wistfully staring at a mannequin and the scene would play out the exact same way. There are brief scenes where Wilson comes alive, but he treats Lopez as more of a chummy friend than a stunning love interest. There’s nothing in Wilson’s performance that ever conveys a shift in his feelings.
Lopez, meanwhile, is trying so hard to sell the under-written Kat Valdez and this unorthodox romance. There are small moments that hint at a more fleshed-out character. Unfortunately, the screenplay is more concerned with advertising Google products and Wix.com than it is digging into why Kat is the way she is. She is much better at selling the fact that she’s falling for Charlie than vice-versa. She’s appropriately giggly and vulnerable, but her flirty barbs and jokes don’t land when Wilson’s blandness makes their back-and-forth screech to a halt. There’s no believable indication that these people from two different walks of life would genuinely come to love each other.
The film is profoundly scatterbrained. It’s packed with half-baked ideas or statements that just distract from what’s meant to be a kind of “modern fairytale.” We simply must discuss the proliferation of social media in our daily lives, the fact that famous people have to constantly overshare online, and the sexism women in the entertainment industry face. None of these are untrue or necessarily uninteresting, but they come and go throughout the film without any real resolution. Kat never has any grand epiphany about her fame, her influence, or the way she uses social media. Charlie never reevaluates his negative stance on social media in any meaningful way. These are all just elements that distract from what should be the focus of any good romantic comedy: two people falling in love.
The film is also a bore to look at. It’s entirely too sleek and clean. It looks more like a Super Bowl commercial at any given moment. There’s no contrast between Kat’s luxurious life and Charlie’s more down-to-earth existence. His apartment is meticulously decorated, straight out of a Pinterest board. The screen is constantly and randomly bombarded by graphics representing the “digital age,” Instagram posts or stories or lives, even filters covering people’s faces. Sometimes, the film will jarringly cut to whatever Kat’s ever-present vlogger is capturing on the camera that never leaves her side. It adds to the overall ugliness of the film. Above all, the omnipresent pop songs are all derivative and irritating, sometimes even drowning out actual dialogue in a given scene. The whole film is just painfully insincere.
Marry Me is overproduced to the point where it’s stifling. It’s constantly shouting at you: Kat Valdez is an icon! She’s also approachable and sweet! Charlie needs to get out of his shell! They’re perfect for each other! But it’s remarkably insecure. It refuses to let us sit with these two characters, to let them show this to us. The best romantic comedies understand that there is nothing more magical than watching two great actors create unique chemistry. Every moment Kat and Charlie share is just too clean, focused on telegraphing every future plot point. There isn’t a single moment where they have a simple, human conversation. Their chemistry isn’t genuine. Marry Me is glittery but hollow, all style and no substance.
