On New Year’s Eve, I happened to see a commercial for Marry Me, and reflexively interpreted the film as an act of spite on the part of its star, Jennifer Lopez. “Ok, Hollywood,” I imagined JLo saying with righteous exasperation, circa February 2020, “you wouldn’t give me an Oscar for Hustlers, so I guess I’m back to this!”
“This” meaning romantic comedies, a genre, we’re constantly being told, that Hollywood has all but abandoned to Netflix in favor of superhero universes and blockbuster action franchises. Lopez herself seemed to have abandoned the genre in recent years. Marry Me marks the first true romantic comedy she has starred in since 2010’s The Back-up Plan. Since then, she’s done mostly thrillers and action movies alongside a couple comedies that, strictly speaking, I wouldn’t classify as rom-coms.
Marry Me opens in theaters this week and will also be available to stream on Peacock. It would, of course, be unwise to judge the film without having seen it. But the trailer for Marry Me, which finds Lopez playing a pop mega star who impulsively marries a humble high school teacher (Owen Wilson) live onstage at a concert, feels…familiar. It seems like a throwback to the kind of featherweight films she appeared in in the early 2000s. Which is surprising, considering the glowing reception she received—and 1,000-percent deserved—for her performance in Hustlers. That film felt like a turning point for JLo—not to say a comeback. After languishing for two decades in critically disappointing movies, it seemed like a moment for her to reinvent herself as an actor. Surely, she would have her pick of more interesting projects. What would she do with her reinvigorated acting cred?
Oh. A rom-com. Opposite Owen Wilson. Huh.
According to Lopez and producing partner Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Marry Me was something of a passion project, a story she felt compelled to tell. “She had an opportunity to pull the curtain back and make a film about what it was like to live and to love in a glass bowl,” Goldsmith-Thomas told The New York Times recently, “to have your mistakes amplified and crucified across all platforms, and to ultimately find your way in spite of it. Add to that the ability to produce, and perform a soundtrack to that journey, and we’d be fools not to make it.”
Also, Lopez is, according to the Times, “a hopeless romantic”—whatever that means. Is that why she keeps coming back to this genre?
Her first romantic comedy was released at, arguably, the height of her cultural power. Released in 2001, The Wedding Planner debuted at number one at the box office the same week that Lopez’s sophomore album reached number one on the Billboard 200 chart. The contrast between the two works is kind of stunning. Whereas the music on J.Lo is vibrant and sexy, a glittering and glowing amalgamation of Latin pop, R&B and dance, The Wedding Planner is bleached to a pastel numbness. That extends to the curious and very 2001 decision to cast Lopez as a character of Italian rather than Puerto Rican descent. She plays Mary, the titular wedding planner, a woman so Type A that she eats take-out off of her best china in a house that looks like the kind of furniture showroom from which you would furnish your McMansion. Mary is the best damn wedding planner in the game—until she accidentally falls in love with the fiancé (Matthew McConaughey) of one of her clients.
The film was not well received at the time, and indeed it is…not great. It is aggressively basic and its plot contrivances strain credibility. As A.O. Scott noted in his review for the New York Times, it also squanders some really great performers, Kathy Najimy and Judy Greer most notably, as well as the opportunity to lob a more incisive critique at the wedding industrial complex. But then, I suppose that would turn off all the future bridezillas who are its target audience.
Still, I wouldn’t say The Wedding Planner was painful to watch, and that in itself taught me a key lesson when it comes to JLo’s rom-coms: You have to give yourself over to the vanilla scented, slightly retrograde, politically anodyne, heterosexual world in which they take place. In short, you kind of have to turn off your brain for a little while. Which, actually, is kind of all I really want to do, ever, all the time. A bottle of Chardonnay generally helps—as it does in most of life.
Lopez’s next rom-com, 2002’s Maid in Manhattan, is, for my money, a significant improvement. I won’t argue with the critics who thought this modern-day Cinderella story was blandly formulaic. Of course it is! It’s literally based on Cinderella! But if a romantic comedy lives and dies by the charm and relatability of its heroine, this one at least has a pulse. Lopez plays Marisa, a single mother who lives in the Bronx and commutes every day to her job as a maid at a tony Midtown hotel, where she dreams of one day becoming a manager. But, through a series of mishaps, she is mistaken for one of the hotel’s guests (pour one out for the late Natasha Richardson) by dashing New York senatorial candidate Chris Marshall (Ralph Fiennes). The two fall in love, but their differing backgrounds and Marisa’s ultimately harmless deception complicate matters.
Now, I don’t want to imply that Lopez is any more believable as a chambermaid from the Bronx than she is as a San Francisco wedding planner. But Marisa is just an infinitely more likeable character than Mary. She’s tough, she’s smart, she’s unpretentious. For all JLo looks like a kajillion bucks in megawatt glamor mode wearing a Harry Winston wreath necklace to a gala with Fiennes’s character, I’d almost rather hang out with Marisa and her co-workers in the hotel employee locker room. And wanting to hang out with the heroine is pretty essential for a rom-com.
Other things Maid in Manhattan has going for it: a perfunctory engagement with class and politics—I mean, it’s better than nothing—and a pretty outstanding roster of supporting characters. Alongside Richardson, you’ve got Bob Hoskins, Frances Conroy, Amy-effing-Sedaris and that bald guy that everyone is horny for lately. (It’s Stanley Tucci.) Even the random kleptomaniacal French sisters are delightful, and add to the sense of this hotel being a quirky world all its own.
That’s another thing I’ll say for JLo: say what you will about her movies, but she’s worked with a ton of extremely wonderful actors. In her next two rom-coms alone—2004’s Shall We Dance and 2005’s Monster-in-Law—she played opposite Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Jane Fonda! But she also tends to be surrounded by some of the best character actors in the business: Wanda Sykes, Adam Scott, Will Arnett, Elaine Stritch! In The Back-up Plan, we get Melissa McCarthy as a spacey, earth mamma type doula, the wonderful Michaela Watkins as the BFF with zero filter and Anthony Anderson as a playground dad with same.
The Back-up Plan represents something of a coda to the original JLo rom-com era. From 2001 to 2005 she starred in one per year. Five years, two albums, one co-headlining tour with then husband Marc Anthony and a few disappointing dramas later, she returned to the romantic comedy with this film about a woman trying to have a baby and a boyfriend. Lopez plays Manhattan pet shop owner and former finance lady (that accounts for all her money) Zoe, who has just been artificially inseminated when she meets and falls in love with the very sexy Stan (Alex O’Loughlin). The usual complications ensue.
The Back-up Plan is a very dumb movie. O’Loughlin’s character is possibly the worst rom-com leading man ever—although now I’m wondering if his uncertainty and anxiety and general messiness is maybe an inversion of the standard trope of the zanily imperfect woman and the stable stoic man. Either way, he just doesn’t work. JLo, meanwhile, seems to be trying for a looser, madcap kind of performance. It doesn’t entirely work either, but as always, the JLo charm remains strong.
Now, none of these are great films. A few of them are actually quite bad. But, for the most part, they are genuinely watchable, even enjoyable. And then there’s Gigli.
Sweet mother of f*ck, Gigli! You’ve no doubt heard about how awful this 2003 Bennifer debacle is. But, you know, you still think, This is a movie that was made and released. Surely people who know about movies signed off on it. Surely it must resemble something like a watchable movie. Well, you’re wrong. Gigli reminds me of when high school drama students have to write and perform their own one-act plays. It’s like, someone put Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in a room and told them to do as much acting at each other as possible without conveying anything resembling actual interpersonal behavior. Jesus, I’m not sure it’s even worth describing Gigli except to say that, once again, JLo’s natural charisma shines through. She’s generally at her best when she’s playing tough but warm, and that’s what she’s doing here as a—sigh—sexy “lesbian” mob enforcer.
So, having watched what I think we can safely say is Jennifer Lopez’s entire rom-com cannon up to this point, I’m not sure I’m much closer to a unifying theory of the JLo rom-com, or of the JLo rom-com heroine.
Variety once described Lopez as “imperious,” and she works hard in her rom-coms to counter that perception, to appear relaxed, down to earth, like a relatable human being rather than an untouchable diva. I wouldn’t say she fails across the board. She is a talented and charismatic performer. And yet, in none of these movies do we really get to see what’s behind the veneer. She is never not perfectly made-up, her hair truly the best hair anyone has ever seen on film. There’s a hilarious scene in The Wedding Planner when Mary catches her reflection in a mirror after being rescued by Dr. Matthew McConaughey. She sees that her hair is slightly mussed and panics. It’s hilarious, not because it humanizes Mary or reveals anything about her rigid standards for herself and others, but because JLo’s version of disheveled is still laughably perfect. Seriously, it’s like three hairs out of place! She is, in every film, either unwilling or incapable of not appearing flawless.
Other observations: JLo is always paired with white guys in these films. And, with the exception of Affleck, there seems to be a distinct downward arc from McConaughey, an actual movie star, to blandly handsome, vaguely familiar looking actors as her love interests. Interpret all of that as you will.
She also seems to have terrible judgement when it come to the film projects she chooses. The phrase “the film was not well-received” appears in the Wikipedia entry for almost all of her films—not just the rom-coms!
Part of me wants to write these films off as largely cynical endeavors; lazily produced multiplex crap aimed at a demographic that Hollywood didn’t think much of, and probably still doesn’t. I’d almost rather imagine Lopez in this formulation as someone who is more invested in the paycheck than the script. I mean, otherwise we must assume that she thinks these movies are good, and I have to believe she is smarter than that.
On the other hand, maybe she’s smart enough to understand that “good” and “enjoyable” aren’t always the same thing. Someone asked me recently whether any of the films nominated for Best Picture Oscars this year are actually fun, feel-good type movies, and I had to concede that, no, they weren’t, not really. And I realized that, despite not really thinking any of JLo’s rom-coms were actually good films—in the sense that they were particularly profound or revealed anything noteworthy about the human condition—I actually had a thoroughly pleasant time drinking cheap white wine and watching these inconsequential movies. In an age when even TV demands your undivided attention with its puzzle box dramas and auteur sit-coms, I can’t tell you how nice it was not to feel like I couldn’t look at my bloody phone while watching The Back-up Plan, etc.!
Whether she’s aiming to be taken seriously as an actor or just wants to get paid a lot of money to be the star of a movie in which she gets to wear pretty clothes, ultimately—and I assume this goes without saying—Jennifer Lopez doesn’t owe me or the New York Times or anyone else an explanation as to why she chooses the projects she does. Following Marry Me, she will next star opposite Josh Duhamel in another rom-com. Due out in June, the more action-oriented Shotgun Wedding finds Lopez playing a bride whose entire wedding gets taken hostage. It’s co-written by New Girl creator Liz Meriwether and Sônia Braga, Jennifer Coolidge, Cheech Marin, Lenny Kravitz and D’Arcy Carden all co-star! It sounds like a freakin’ blast!
