He’s Just Not That Into You (2009)
WB DVD
d. Ken Kwapis; pr. Nancy Juvonen; scr. Abby Kohn. Mark Silverstein; book. Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo; ph. John Bailey; m. Cliff Eidelman; ed. Cara Silverman; cast. Jennifer Aniston, Ginnifer Goodwin, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johansson, Ben Affleck, Justin Long (129 mins)
Based upon the best-selling self-help book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo He’s Just Not That into You is Hollywood’s embrace of the hugely-successful self-help and self-empowerment movement. To those who see meaning and value in this popular genre the film carries an enormous responsibility: to balance the optimism, self-confidence and self-assertion that underlie successful self-actualization with the populism needed to transform such material into a Hollywood hit. But bringing this connection from the bookshelf to the big screen is another matter entirely.
The ethos of the self-help movement has been inching its way into the positivism of populist Hollywood, cemented by the success of The Pursuit of Happyness and the elevation of Will Smith to the status of determined, individualist American success story. Smith toyed with this iconic status to endorse a traditional (and Christian) view of morality and community in the successful I am Legend. Indeed, positivism, success, the need for goal-setting and individual achievement are increasingly being addressed as Hollywood gradually adopts the philosophy and ideas behind the self help movement.
This emergence of the self help movement in Hollywood is effectively cemented by He’s Just Not That Into You: it’s the ground zero for the future of self-help in the cinema – a basis from which to move on. It is in this film that self-help as a movement begins to formally assert itself as a transforming cultural and personal phenomenon and to seek codification in genre – romantic comedy. Yet, within a literary movement that at its most commercial has a tendency to replace perspective with blind enthusiasm it is necessary to consider this film less for the core values of self-empowerment in relationships which it mundanely dramatizes than for the assembly-line nature of its manufacture.
He’s Just Not That Into You is self-help writ large as glossy Hollywood entertainment, so blatantly contrived and calculated a package that it only skims the surface of the self help movement’s ideology while endorsing its positivism within an assembled re-working of the morality of relationships explored a generation ago by Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner in When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. Director Kwapis and his scripters deliberately use techniques from these films in a fast-talking script that longs for screwball comedy but settles for reassuring safety.
There are opportunities here, especially considering the screenwriters’ involvement in Sex and the City, to update the romantic comedy and define the changing nature of sexual and romantic relationship expectations post Kim Cattrall / Candida Royalle sexual self- empowerment. But the cultural and empowerment for women phenomenon of Sex and the City is virtually ignored here and the characterizations director Kwapis offers are simplistic to the point of token superficiality. That’s the problem with He’s Just Not That Into You: it has little sense of emotional complexity and human inter-personal need within a surrounding sociological conditioning of expectation and accepts traditional values to the point of spoon feeding them back as supposed ideals of romantic self-actualization.
He’s Just Not that Into You is an ensemble romantic comedy concerning five women – Ginnifer Goodwin, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johansson, Drew Barrymore – and their rather tangled relationships with men: Goodwin stalks men who don’t call her back until her attitude is transformed by Justin Long (who tells her a simple truism you’d honestly think would be blatantly self-evident: if a guy likes you, he’ll call); Aniston wants marriage but long-time boyfriend Ben Affleck is dead against it; Connolly is re-modelling her house whilst her husband is having an affair with Johansson; Barrymore, rather extemporaneously, soon develops an interest in Johansson’s boyfriend.
Who’s seeing whom? What do they want out of relationship? How important is sex in a relationship? These questions are addressed in a convoluted cross-cutting assembly of a romantic comedy. It’s editing rhythms and gimmick of mock-reminiscence smack of When Harry Met Sally and just as Nora Ephron latched onto the classic romance An Affair to Remember as an ideal – a film of undoubted influence to her parent’s generation (both Ephron’s parents were scriptwriters) – He’s Just Not That Into You director Ken Kwapis latches onto another romance, one which he can relate to – the 1980s teen coming of age romantic drama Some Kind of Wonderful.
Director Kwapis evokes the tomboyish Mary Stuart Masterson of Some Kind of Wonderful in a nostalgic way – making the 1980s teen independence that once catapulted director John Hughes and actress Molly Ringwald to iconic status the cultural reference point for his characters’ romantic expectations. And therein lies the paucity of originality in He’s Just Not That Into You: it knows the films that have proven sociologically influential, the highlights of recent romantic comedy tradition, and seeks to superimpose this formula onto the existing self-help ideology merely to capitalize on it. Quite simply, director Kwapis is here not up to the task or the responsibility.
There is nevertheless an infectious attitude to He’s Just Not That Into You – everyone handles things well, nothing gets anyone down and with a good, positive attitude everything in a relationship will turn out for the best, whether the relationship proves permanent or temporary. This “everything will turn out right” optimism encapsulates the positivism of the self-help movement to be sure but Kwapis can only illustrate this by dramatizing either the most banal and uninteresting concerns or emphasizing the most traditional of ideals. The sheer lack of human complexity here renders the characters shallow rather than amiable and their concerns emerge as clichéd pap.
He’s Just Not That Into You pretends to be hip, slick and entertaining but it’s packaged, vacuous and unfunny and turns the values of the self-help movement into Hollywood dross. By concentrating on the enjoyment of superficial things, Kwapis misunderstands the impetus to self-actualization behind the self-help movement, offers his cheapened mediocrity as a sitcom writ large and, worse, ignores the cultural influence of Sex and the City. Where Sex and the City presented an ensemble of women embracing sex and transforming morality in order to express their actualized selves, He’s Just Not That Into You presents an ensemble of women still socialized towards ideals of marriage and monogamy.
The continued association between happiness and traditional moral values under-pinning He’s Just Not That Into You epitomizes Hollywood at its most play-it-safe mundane conformity. There is an oft-buried issue in self-help literature as a movement which this film simply does not address: the importance of individual self actualization in a culture heavily socialized towards traditional moral values of success. The trouble with He’s Just Not That Into You is that the film orients its characters towards wholly conventional ideals – it does not challenge people to think for themselves, it has little sense of the balance of individuality and empathy in relationships and ultimately reduces self-empowerment to trivial conformity. The ethos of the self-help movement has far more to offer than Hollywood seizes on in this pre-fabricated banality.
