Happily ever after, ish: how the rom-com came back – but darker and deeper

“What if we get sick of each other?”

“We’re already sick of each other. It’s the best.”

The most romantic movie exchange of the year so far arrives in a somewhat unlikely package: 80-minutes into Palm Springs, Andy Samberg’s millennial twist on Groundhog Day. The film, which premiered at Sundance in January of 2020, is about two strangers stuck in the purgatory of an infinitely repeating wedding (“it’s one of those infinite time loop situations you might have heard about” as Samberg’s jaded, can-cracking lead Nyles puts it).

Until recently it was itself stuck in the purgatory of an infinitely delayed film release schedule but with its arrival on Amazon Prime last week, rom-com lovers the world over finally got some satisfaction. If there are any of them left, that is.

The rom-com has been an endangered species for a while now. Its glorious boom in the Nineties – beginning with Billy Crystal sprinting through New York’s Upper West Side to tell Meg Ryan that it takes her an hour and a half to order a sandwich and he loves her for it; and wrapping with Hugh Grant bursting into a national press conference to declare himself a daft prick and beg for Julia Robert’s heart – was followed by a slow and ugly death in the Naughties, taking Katherine Heigl’s post-Grey’s Anatomy career with it.

No great loss, you might say. “You could easily see the genre’s demise as a form of justice. Don’t women in movies have better things to do than wonder if they’re going to meet some dude?” wrote Wesley Morris in the New York Times in 2019. It’s a good argument, especially for someone like me who grew up in the era of such Heigl horror shows as 27 Dresses and The Ugly Truth. These are films that did absolutely nothing for feminism; the regressive tropes they burst with – scheming bitch, cold-hearted player – are never adequately tamped out by their spectacularly unconvincing redemption endings.

Their roots are in the John Hughes invented high-school comedy tradition (The Breakfast Club, Say Anything, Ten Things I Hate About You) but with none of its charm; playful clique stereotypes (nerd, hot girl, bad boy) work within the four walls of a classroom but fall apart when transposed onto the adult world. A handful of fun, more progressive exceptions – How To Lose A Guy in Ten Days; Friends with Benefits – couldn’t change the rom-com’s depressing downwards spiral.

But the rom-com was not always thus – and if the past five years are anything to go by, it will not be forever. Thanks to a handful of thoughtful young filmmakers, the much-maligned form is currently experiencing a mini-boom; not yet on the scale of the Nineties, but the century’s still young. Not all of it is good: since 2018, Netflix has been love-bombing subscribers with films of wildly varying quality.

Most are inoffensively bland, with little to recommend them beyond the opportunity to spend two hours enjoying two hot people enjoy each other (Set It Up; Always Be My Maybe), while a handful veer on unwatchable (the title of Holidate really should have been warning enough). Too many Trojan-horse stickily regressive politics into sugary feminist shells: woman begins film vowing that she doesn’t need a man; reformed bad boy shows her the error her ways.

Palm Springs, however, joins a handful of recent indie gems that include Leslye Headland’s underrated 2015 film Sleeping with Other People, starring the brilliant comic pairing of Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie; Kumail Nanjiani’s very well-rated 2017 flick The Big Sick, based on the true story of how he met his wife, who co-wrote it; and Jeffrey Chan and Andrew Rhymer’s quietly excellent 2019 film Plus One, which was hoovered up by Netflix and dumped depressingly undifferentiated among the rest of the manure.

These films represent more than a straightforward rom-com renaissance. “We’re all f---ing alone” says Nyles at the beginning of Palm Springs (his name is surely a head-tilt to his preferred school of depressing German philosophy). By itself, it’s hardly a radical statement: rom-coms like to take their leads on a journey to optimism (the genre’s most famous protagonist has the infamous habit of reading the ending of a book first, in case he dies before he gets there).

But in the context of Palm Springs, it is rather more disturbing. We soon discover that Nyles has been trapped in the same 24-hour period for an immeasurable amount of time: day, after day, after day he wakes up to the sight of his awful girlfriend’s gorgeous lower leg, remembering that by the end of the night, she’ll be wrapping it around another man.

Since everyone else in Nyles’ reality is always experiencing the day for the first time, there is no possibility of genuine and honest human connection; he is utterly devoid of companionship. Considered in this context, his words leave a sourer taste than the standard compulsory rom-com first-act cynicism – they seem hideously, hopelessly true, and not just for those unlucky enough to be trapped in a time-loop (it quickly becomes an allegory for the meaninglessness of life in general). Director Max Barbakow and his co-writer Andy Siara’s sharply insightful script has tapped into the anxiety embedded at the core of every rom-com – and every couple.

The claim on which the genre rests is that the purpose of life is to find love (this gives writers license to make it the purpose of a movie). It also is the basis on which the success of the movie is measured – have the protagonists found love by the end? The problem, as with any intangible concept, is that there is no standard of proof for love. How do you know he’s the one? You don’t. These films must rely on persuasion, rather than proof, to convince their audiences their goal has been achieved.

They must hold at bay the other terrible possibility: How do you know he’s the one? Because he’s the best option you have, at the moment you decide you’re tired of looking (in other words, he’s not). Think of Carrie Fisher’s expression of ultimate coupled-up contentment in When Harry Met Sally: “Tell me I’ll never have to be out there again”; love might not be the certainty of finding the right person, but rather of not wanting to keep going out with all the wrong ones. It is this most unromantic of suspicions that lurks, shark-like, below the surface of these films. Is love transporting and ecstatic and true – or are we all just terrified of being alone?

Weaker films circumnavigate the problem with cheap theatrical tricks. Think of Matthew McConaughey pushing Jennifer Lopez out of the way of a car in The Wedding Planner or Meg Ryan’s letter to Tom Hanks just happening to be the one among thousands that his son picks out in Sleepless in Seattle. Even The Big Sick, true to life as it – astonishingly – is, benefits from the emotionally-revelatory convenience of putting one of its leads in a coma. You don’t have to wonder if you’re meant to be with someone if the universe literally chucks them at you (or threatens to take them away forever). Better films accept the uncertainty and make it their own: the last line of When Harry Met Sally is “It’s about old friends.” You can do away with the need for romantic certainty when you’re happy to just wile away the time with someone.

Following in Nora Ephron’s formidable (yet diminutive) footsteps, the best of the latest batch of rom-coms lean in to their philosophical anxieties. Palm Springs goes the furthest, thanks to the terror inherent to its supernatural scenario, and also to the performances of its two leads, Samberg and Cristin Miloti. Through them, the audience experiences moments of genuine, chest-tightening doubt. Can we really transcend the solitude we are all born into, or is the lifetime of ideal companionship Nyles promises the newly-weds in his charming, disingenuous opening speech as fantastical as going to a wedding and getting stuck in a time loop?

In Plus One, that question is personified in the protagonist Ben (played by the appropriately Everymanish Jack Quaid), who nearly screws up his relationship with old college friend Alice (one of the most delightfully conceived characters of recent times, superbly realised by Maya Erskine) because of his fruitless quest to find the one. “Why is everybody so in love? And just so… so sure?” he rails to his married best friend, a lovely cameo from SNL’s Beck Bennett. “Dude, they’re not” comes the sage reply. “We’re just going for it… And it’s nice to tell someone you’re in. It’s nice to hear it back.” He’s Carrie Fisher, through an arch, slightly inarticulate millennial mouthpiece.

The married couple played by Jason Mantzoukas and Andrea Savage fulfil a similar function in Sleeping with Other People; the potentially depressing nature of their toddler-filled existence is upended by their screwballing running commentary on the depressing nature of their toddler-filled existence. The film’s coda – a lovely tribute to the old married couples who punctuate When Harry Met Sally – is five minutes of them chatting pure breeze. These are two people who did go for it, who are sick of each other, but will never stop finding the funny side.

All these films follow the gentle Ephron-school of deflated romance: if in doubt, marry your best friend. Even Palm Springs, for all its existential angst, ends up there too (when it finally stops going round in circles). “I think that life should be shared now” declares Nyles (still 10% the redeemed bad boy, because no script is perfect), prompting Sarah to wonder if they’ll eventually grow sick of each other. His reply is clear-eyed, and unsentimental, and bizarrely romantic. It’s true love, liberated from the straitjacket of certainty. The rom-com just grew up.

Palm Springs is on Amazon Prime now

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