Rom-Com Purgatory: “Made Of Honor.”
My girlfriend is working on a project about romantic comedies, and as such she’s had to watch a lot of them. I agreed to sit through them with her. These are some of the terrible things I learned…
Here’s some advice for people who think they’ve been abducted by aliens: If you find yourself inexplicably missing a big chunk of time with no memory of what happened, check that you weren’t just watching a Patrick Dempsey movie.
Dempsey, who skillfully parlayed his long running role on “Grey’s Anatomy” into a permanent position as a fairly hard pub quiz answer, shares an ethos — or possibly an agent — with fellow romcom stalwart Matthew McConaughey in that both men are decent actors who seem to insist on picking the most insipid, bland material possible in which to appear. My working theory is that likeable, good looking actors with decent comic timing overestimate their ability to save a terrible project.
There are actors who can elevate material — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson springs to mind — but the actors who elevate mediocre films into pretty good ones seem to at least be smart enough to pick mediocre scripts in the first place. The Dempseys of the world pick terrible scripts and assume that they’ll be able to spin them into gold. The result is that the projects either remain awful or, in the best possible outcome, are elevated to the level of completely bland.
Bland is almost worse. Last week’s godawful romcom, “Failure To Launch,” at least stuck in the mind for being weird and disturbing as well as unfunny. On the surface, “Made of Honor” is just unfunny. Luckily, my notes from watching this film start out bored and dismissive and slowly reach a point where I’ve underlined “NAZI PROPAGANDA.” Bear with me and I’ll explain.
The movie opens with a young Patrick Dempsey at a college fancy dress party in 1998, dressed as Bill Clinton. This isn’t particularly funny, and you suspect that the guy who went to a college party in ’98 wearing a Clinton mask was a comedic hack even then, but this is a flashback scene in a 2008 movie. That means whoever is responsible for this film thought that a Bill Clinton/blowjob joke still had some mileage left in it the year Obama got in.
Dempsey-as-Clinton accidentally gets into bed with the wrong girl (Michelle Monaghan), which is a little awkward when you remember that Bill Clinton is an accused rapist. Still, this sexual assault is played for laughs and then, suddenly, it’s ten years later and Dempsey and Monaghan are best friends who have never had sex. Also, Dempsey is a millionaire because he invented the little cardboard sleeve that goes on coffee cups to shield your hand from heat. Monaghan, a talented actress with absolutely nothing to work with, does something or other with paintings. Who cares? She’s a woman and only there as a combination cock holster and trophy.
At a party, Dempsey has Monaghan slow dance with him so that he can hide from a nerdy-looking woman who is obsessed with him. This woman — hilariously — has a blog. That’s the entirety of that gag. It’s 2008 and one of the punclines in this movie is basically “the internet.” The only thing that’s worn worse than that gag is Patrick Dempsey, 42 at the time of the movie’s release but still gamely pretending to be the same age as Monaghan, actually ten years his junior.
Monagahan has to go to Scotland for a work related reason (probably to get some wode; it’s not really clear) and while she’s away Dempsey realises he misses her and has human feelings like a pussy. He intends to tell her upon her return, but instead finds out she’s become engaged to Kevin McKidd’s character, a hunky Scotsman.
I’m not sure what the correct phrase is for Kevin McKidd — he’s willingly taken the money and run with a script that’s fairly insulting to the Scottish people, despite the fact that he’s a Scot. Is there a Scottish version of an Uncle Tom? Like, a House Celt, or something?
Either way, Monaghan is so smitten with Angus McBland (might actually have been his character’s name, I don’t know) that she is marrying him in Scotland in two weeks and wants Dempsey to be her maid of honor. Why the spelling is different in the title, given that Dempsey is a man-whore who immediately begins plotting to sabotage his best friend’s wedding and is therefore in no way made of anything except narcissism and herpes, remains unclear.
All of Monaghan’s friends hate Dempsey for his womanising, except her fat friend, who is only there for comic relief and as such isn’t allowed feelings. It’s funny because she weighs more than thinner women, see?
Dempsey shows McKidd around New York and at the advice of his friends decides to try to emasculate him in a game of basketball, a sport which McKidd is utterly unfamiliar with because he’s from the mystical, far off land of Scotland. We all know that Celtics know nothing about basketball.
McKidd proves unexpectedly athletic and one of Dempsey’s friends comments that he’ll be tougher competition, romantically, than Dempsey had expected. Because had Dempsey been better at making three point shots, the absent Michelle Monaghan would have psychically realised this fact and ditched her fiancee then and there. The whole conversaton implies that whoever wrote this movie* won their wife in a basketball game and assumes that this is normal for everyone.
McKidd returns to Scotland and Monaghan enlists the help of her local priest to travel to Scotland and perform the wedding, which, if you’re cursed to be paying attention like I was, is in less than two weeks. The priest either had nothing better to do or, in an unexplored paedophilic subplot, needed a reason to skip town for a while. He agrees to officiate and assumes that Dempsey, the male maid of honour, must be gay. This, too, is played for laughs in a movie from 2008.
The cast then all fuck off to Scotland for the wedding, because it’s totally normal for a friend to ask if you can be in Scotland in two weeks’ time in an expensive outfit. Money seems to be no object for anybody in this movie, as evidenced when there is another sporting event for the chance to win a shot at Michelle Monaghan’s genitals. The rich Scottish family from which McKidd is descended hold “a highland games” to celebrate the wedding. This is nearly as nonsensical as the line about McKidd’s character having won “the medal of honour” at some point, which is not a decoration in the British military and never has been.
Anyway, as McKidd once again proves that he’s better at sports than Dempsey and therefore entitled to fuck a woman, Dempsey (whose short kilt is mocked as gay by the native Scots, who are wearing slightly longer dresses) fails at the caber toss and totals an antique Jaguar. No mention is made of this incident ever again.
Finally realising their feelings for each other, Dempsey and Monaghan have a fight and Dempsey leaves before being convinced to return by a psychic sheepdog. I’m not making that up, although I am making it sound more interesting than it actually is. Dempsey steals a horse from a farmer, promising the farmer a cut of every cardboard coffee collar sold worldwide. The farmer agrees to this, and then, as Dempsey rides off, admits that he has no idea what a coffee collar is, because Scotland is portrayed as some sort of third world backwater.
At least that means the film isn’t totally inaccurate.
Dempsey interrupts the wedding in the nick of time and he and Monaghan kiss. As a final proof that no Scottish people were consulted for accuracy during the making of this film, the congregation does not proceed to riot and kick the ever loving shit out of the Americans, the priest, and then each other.
Everyone goes back to New York and the leads get married, none of their friends seeming remotely annoyed that they just pissed thousands of dollars up the wall on a trip to an abortive wedding in Scotland. We end on ANOTHER gag about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
Throughout this film, whenever I paused it, a little button popped up in the coner of the screen, saying “Watch Something Else.” It began to feel like it was taunting me. Still, I haven’t addressed why one of my notes said NAZI PROPAGANDA.
The overall problem isn’t specifically with “Made of Honor”, but with the romcom in general. It’s a staple of romcoms that anyone remotely outside the heteronormal is a walking punchline. Gay men are played for laughs (because they don’t want to behave the correct way and fuck women) or used as props for female leads, so that a man can be on screen without threatening the romance. This is because all men are constantly in competition with each other for women, who don’t have any agency of their own and will fall hopelessly in love with whoever wins them.
Fat characters are only allowed on screen so that they can be mocked for being fat. Unless they’re male, in which case they have to be mocked for being unathletic. “Made of Honor” has one recurring nerd who turns up in the many, many basketball scenes, holding a basketball and wearing glasses and being hated — really, truly treated with outright loathing — by the straight, pretty stars.
Being bad at sports is specifically a joke at the expense of men, incidentally. Nerdiness is an equal offense, with nerdy men or women each being the butt of jokes. People of colour will be at an absolute minimum — often there’s only one black character whose job is to be a second string friend of the male lead. Sometimes two birds are killed with one stone and the heroine has a sassy friend who is black AND gay, but whose only interests are clothes and the heroine’s happiness.
The whole worldview of the bad romantic comedy is actually scarily eugenic. This is a movie that tells the audience that only pretty, straight people should breed, and that these are the only people who have feelings worth caring about. Women can be won in competition if you’re suitably macho, and ideally these women will know not to have too many ideas of their own. The image of a strapping man and an attractive doormat of a woman being joined in eternal matrimony is an image that feels equally at home on fascist billboards or in the end of innumerable piss-poor “comedies.”
Interestingly, the post war period was much better at equal rights for women on screen — many classic romantic comedies of the period are a battle of the sexes, with the women being given as many good, biting lines as the men.
“Made of Honor,” sadly, isn’t a battle of the sexes. It feels more like a fucking war crime.
*No, I’m not looking up who wrote this, fuck you.