Deborah Lipp

Runaway Bride (1999) 4/10
Out of ideas, columnist Ike Graham (Richard Gere) uses a story he hears from a drunk in a bar—about a woman who repeatedly leaves men at the altar—as the basis for his USA Today column. The woman, Maggie Carpenter (Julia Roberts), humiliated upon reading about herself, writes a scathing letter to the editor which gets Ike fired. Seeking “vindication,” Ike comes to Maggie’s small town to write about her.

Runaway Bride is a vile movie, and watching it is some kind of Christmas punishment for goofing off in front of the TV and watching whatever crap TNT throws at me. Ike Graham is a nasty, misogynist guy. In the opening scene it’s established that, since a deadline is looming, everyone expects him to write yet another column condemning women as evil bitches who are out to get him. The story he hears about Maggie fits the agenda he already had.

This is ugly stuff, and I wondered how the film would handle it. There’s the faintest whiff of feminist sensibility in the opening, as women will have none of his bullshit, and his only friends appear to be his ex-wife (Rita Wilson) and her husband (Hector Elizondo). It’s pretty harsh if your only friend is your ex-wife; it kind of says “I can befriend you only if I first get away from you.” So to open with “you are hateful to women” and then have him get called on it, it seemed like maybe they were going to deal with, y’know, hating women, and maybe that was why I kept watching.

Except they don’t deal with it. Ike shows up in Maggie’s small town and befriends everyone. He can speak everyone’s language; he can talk Jerry with the Deadhead, he can discuss music with the musicians, he talks football with the coach, and within 24 hours has won everyone in town to him except Maggie. Hateful guy? That wouldn’t further the plot, now would it?

Oh, he’s hateful enough to Maggie, at first. He tells her she got him fired and ruined his reputation. Hello? He used the story of a drunken source without a modicum of fact-checking, and got caught. So not only is he a misogynist, he can’t even take professional responsibility as a journalist.

Now, you know this is a romance, so I’m waiting for the apology scene. It’d better be good, I’m thinking, because that was disgusting. But it never comes. I figured on a lameass apology scene that would irritate me, but there wasn’t any. Nada. Nil. They just give him a new personality for no reason except to create a romance where none should be.

This is yes, bad writing, and yes, formulaic, but also fundamentally sexist, because Ike’s sexism isn’t taken seriously enough to need amending. It’s amusing, and of course amusing flaws are merely quirky in a romantic comedy. Real sexism, sadly, is not merely quirky.

Where the film works is in Julia Robert’s portrayal of Maggie. Fie on you if you think she can’t act! She’s vulnerable, sweet, appealing, and sad. When people joke about her running away she layers smiles and amusement on top of shame that peeps through just enough. It all works especially well, unfortunately, because Roberts is, herself, a famous runaway bride, having ditched Keifer Sutherland nearly at the altar, and ended an engagement with Dylan McDermott. So there are moments that are painfully lost and sad and real, and actually work to let you in.

There’s some good comedy here, but most of it relies on trickery and slapstick. For example, home movies that change perspective and have meaningful closeups in ways that home movies just can’t do. So the joke that you’re watching this home movie of this funny moment gets lost because the camera work refuses to confine itself.

We can give a shout out to Hector Elizondo, the workingest actor in Hollywood. Are there movies he hasn’t been in? Nice to see that a Hispanic actor once confined to servants and “ethnic” roles now gets to play a professional.