Rom-Com Purgatory: “Leap Year.”
You have to hand it to Matthew Goode. He might be a chinless wonder who was woefully miscast as Ozymandias in the Watchmen movie…
…and his whole part in 2010’s “Leap Year” might consist of a questionable accent wrapped around an unlikeable character, but at least he admits it.
There’s often a wealth of insightful material on IMDb’s “trivia” page for terrible romantic comedies. Sometimes it’s the little things, like the fact that there were glaring legal or technical errors which nobody noticed because the entire production staff didn’t care about the end product. In the case of “Leap Year,” IMDb informs us that Matthew Goode thinks it’s a terrible movie, and freely admitted that he only took the job so he could fly home to London on weekends.
“Leap Year” tells the tedious story of a woman (Amy Adams) who is tired of waiting for her boyfriend to propose and so decides to travel to Ireland (where her boyfriend is at a conference) to propose to him on February 29th in line with the old tradition that a woman is only allowed to propose on Leap Day.
Already, we’re deep in the woods of the usual gender stereotype propaganda. Women aren’t allowed to have any agency, so Adams is seizing the one day every four years in which it’s acceptable for her to make a decision with her flighty female brain and fickle, wandering uterus.
Her flight to Ireland is beset by turbulence and she is diverted to Wales. From there, she is forced to take a boat to Ireland, but a storm causes the boat — which was travelling from Wales to Dublin — to divert to Dingle, because nobody involved in this movie owns a map.
Dingle proves to be a town consisting of one pub and a school, which is strange as even a ten second Google search reveals that it’s actually got a marina and an aquarium and other mod cons. Still, Adams is stuck there and has to pay surly barman Matthew Goode to drive her to Dublin. A series of “comedic” mishaps means that the car is written off, but Goode accompanies her anyway for reasons that are never addressed.
On the way, Amy Adams attempts to flag down a ride with a passing van, only to find there are three strange men already riding in the back. Perhaps this movie takes place in a universe in which everyone is unaware of the concept of rape, because Adams cheerfully agrees to ride with them, flings her suitcase inside, and is then distracted long enough that the van can drive off with her stuff.
Adams and Goode eventually arrive at a pub, where the four guys who robbed her on the road are divvying up her designer underwear for reasons tantalisingly unknown. Goode then fights the men for her things, winning handily against what appear to be the only four gypsies in Ireland who have never been in a pub fight.
Still on the road, Goode and Adams arrive at a train station and, with three hours to kill, walk to the top of a nearby hill to look at a castle. This twenty minute walk takes them two hours and fifty minutes, apparently, as they miss the train and have to stay at the local B&B, where the landlady is strictly religious, forcing them to pretend to be married. This leads to one of the creepiest dinners in all of film, in which the old couple exhort Adams and Goode to make out with each other at the dinner table and the two of them implausibly agree.
Still on foot the next morning (Adams appears to have walked for miles in high heels, for some reason) our heroes are caught in a hail storm and seek refuge in a church, which turns out to be in the middle of conducting a wedding ceremony. They’re invited to stay, and despite Adams allegedly being in a hurry to get to Dublin, they don’t just wait out the rain but instead stay for the entire wedding reception and into the night. They are forced to leave when a drunk Adams accidentally spills wine on the bride, and the two spend the night on a park bench.
Waking up looking immaculate despite the fact that they got drunk and slept on a park bench in Ireland in February, Adams and Goode make it to Dublin where Goode’s surly attitude is finally explained. You see, his girlfriend, she… well… she left him.
…That’s it. She didn’t even have the good grace to die of something tragic, she just pissed off one day with another bloke and Goode has been a whiny douchebag ever since. Somehow, this melts Adams’ heart and she is now torn between her long term partner (a successfuly cardiologist) and this sulky Irish barman. Then her boyfriend proposes and she goes back to Boston with him. Once there, she is heartbroken to learn that he only proposed to win over the housing assosciation in the fancy apartment complex in which they were trying to buy a unit.
Amy Adams, who in the preceeding few days lied about being married to a total stranger in order to get a room at a B&B, is outraged that her long term partner lied about being married to her in order to secure their dream home. Quite why this is such a big deal in her mind can probably only be explained by the fact that people who write romantic comedies often have Josef Fritzl level respect for women.
Anyway, Adams dumps her cardiologist fiancee and goes back to Ireland to live in a barely solvent pub with Matthew Goode. The end. I give ’em six months, tops.
It would be fair to say that “Leap Year” is one of the most unremarkable things ever put on film. Early Lumiere footage of a train arriving at a station is genuinely more diverting in terms of entertainment, but here’s the thing: There’s something very, very odd about this movie.
Mid way through the credits, six special effects people are credited. Six. For a film in which the majority of the time is spent walking across bits of Ireland.
It’s true that some shots are CGI’d — the castle that the main characters visit is nowhere near where it is in the film, so was presumably a composite shot — but did that really take six people?!
Even if it did, there are a further six stunt performers listed, plus their co-ordinator. I might make it my new job to become a stunt man on romantic comedies, because I honestly can’t think of an easier gig in showbusiness this side of “Bruce Willis’ hairdresser.”
For a while now, I’ve suspected that the reason romcoms exist is as some sort of tax dodge. They aren’t funny, and there can’t be that much of an audience for material this poor, so why do so many get made?
It would take a vast amount of time and effort to untangle the vagueries of Hollywood accounting — for example, the guy who wrote “Forrest Gump” didn’t make a lot of money from the rights to his book, as the movie didn’t turn a profit on paper. Neither, for comparison, did “Return of the Jedi.” So to say Hollywood is unscrupulous in its financial dealings is a major understatement. Is it therefore so hard to believe that the lacklustre romcom genre, which often seems to require no effort from anyone at all, is at heart just some sort of elaborate financial scam?
In the space of four romcoms, I’ve gone from being entirely dismissive of the genre to accusing it of being Nazi propaganda and an elaborate financial swindle. It’s a group of films that, for the most part, attempts to cement a heteronormative status quo and reduce women to mindless breeding stock, whilst quietly making even more money for the rich. I’m beginning to think that romantic comedies are, in a very real sense, an embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the world.