Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Cast: Meg Ryan, Kevin Kline, Timothy Hutton, Jean Reno
Have I Seen it Before: …yes? Although as I type this I have virtually no memory for the individual moments for the movie. Maybe I saw it in the middle of it on Cable once? Maybe Lora was in the middle of watching it and I came in on the middle of it.
Did I Like It: I’m a little disappointed when writer-directors (like Kasdan) direct a movie they themselves didn’t write. It feels so mercenary. Is it art? Does a film even need to be art? Anybody who complains about the sameness of movies these days needs to understand that nearly any movie in this genre could be cut together in any haphazard manner, and it would all still kind of make sense. Kevin Kline might speak french intermittently, and Meg Ryan might be really into email and call-in radio shows at random times, but we’d all still have pretty good time.
That probably doesn’t have much to do with this film itself. All of the main players are doing their level-headed mid-90s best. Meg Ryan swings between high strung and adorable like she was put on the planet to do it (which, going by box office receipts alone, she was), and Kevin Kline becomes embodies the contradictions of a leading man and quirky character actor which I… just realized now he peaked in Wild Wild West (1999).
And that’s what most romantic comedies. Cookie cutter plots with people commercially proven to be likable. You can get extra points (possibly even on the back end, if you managed to finagle a producer credit, like Meg Ryan in this particular instance) if you can set the movie in some far flung location that has an aura of romance at its center.
It’s done well, but then again its not hard to do that well.