(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Not all romantic comedies (rom-coms) are created equal.
Yes, they all share certain near-inviolable tropes and tick a certain set of boxes that guarantee love will win the day no matter what comes against it, but it’s the deployment of these expected elements that influences whether the love story will feature like the most buoyant and fulsomely realised of escapist romantic delights or a phoning in of love that feels like someone has gone down a checklist to make sure nothing is, rather unimaginatively missed.
The exceedingly good news about Katherine Center is that she has the magical ability, possessed by all the best rom-com writers out there to make the inclusion of the cliches we adore and love feel like the freshest and most wondrously alive of journeys into the heart.
The Rom-commers is a verdant delight, full of snappy, funny and meaningful dialogue, characters who are as far from narrative-serving cardboard cutouts as you can get, and a story that refuses to bow down to the usual trajectory of a rom-com story.
In fact, while it ends exactly as you might expect, the getting there is fiendishly clever and highly original, happy to let the raw pain of life derail things in the most authentic way possible because it knows that while falling in love is wonderful, it’s in the hands, and hearts, of fallible people who don’t always get it right and who are steered by the emotional baggage they carry and the pain that scars them as much as the hope of love that dances in their souls.
I had a theory that we gravitate toward the stories we need in life. Whatever we’re longing for–adventure, excitement, emotion, connection–we turn to stories that help is find it. Whatever questions we’re struggling with–sometimes questions so deep, we don’t even really know we’re asking them–we look for answers in stories.
Somehow Center manages to be brutally honest about the terrors, unexpected darkness and the diabolical twists and turns of life, while imbuing The Rom-commers with a confected loveliness that feels like the zippy vivacity of the very best rom-coms out there.
The lead character Emma, who love rom-coms and is a super talented writer of yet to be picked-up romantic screenplays, has certainly known some pain in her time.
With family tragedy having curtailed any sort of normal run out of the teenage years into adulthood, Emma, who has had to forgo what she wants for others, is suddenly given a chance to realise her dreams.
She’s offered the once in a lifetime chance to co-write with the legendary Charlie Yates, a man who found success as a screenwriter in college and who has built upon it ever since, becoming a name in Hollywood when most of his contemporaries are labouring anonymously in the rarely-recognised background.
He is a star and Emma is obsessed with him and his writing prowess, able to quote his lines and reference his films, and now, about to be given the chance to get an in-trouble rom-com screenplay over the line.
It’s her dream come true and her chance to live the kind of life most twentysomethings take for granted, and in a town which is ostensibly to make all kinds of fantasies and impossible wishlists come true.
(courtesy official author site)
Alas, Emma arrives, taken to Charlie’s mansion (once owned by Esther Williams) by her bestie from high school and a major talent manager, Logan Scott, to find that the hero of her screenwriting dreams is actually a bit of a jerk.
Okay, a whole lot of jerk.
And Emma is stuck with him for six weeks; if she lasts the distance, she gets a life-changing payout but if she goes, well, its back to wholly uninspiring business-as-usual.
So, she has to make it work by tackling the fact, first and foremost, that curmudgeonly Charlie does not believe in love, a misanthrope who sees the dark and the fearful for reasons explain in the novel, his cynical outlook on life standing in stark contrast to Emma’s vivacious willingness to embrace the wonder and expansiveness of love, true love.
It’s a classic enemies-to-friends tropes, and yes, The Rom-commers does make the most of it but here’s where things gets interesting because Center doesn’t go down the expected route, at least not straight ahead, pedal to the metal, and while we are treated to the inevitable happy ever after, we don’t arrive by anything like the expected route.
In fact, The Rom-commers tosses a ton of very real hurt, pain and broken humanity into the mix, leavening the story while things light, romantic and frothy, a state of narrative being stoked by dialogue to buiyantly fabulous that you ride along on the effervescent wave of its magical Nora Ephon-ness.
‘Are you asking me what love feels like?’
…
‘It feels warm,’ I [Emma] said, eyes closed. ‘It feels hopeful and kind. Sunshiny. And soothing.’ And then, knowing that there was a chance he’d scoff at me for talking about “the heart” and call it a cliché, I went ahead and said: ‘It feels like your heart is glowing.’
Because that is true. That is what it feels like.
So, when you do reach the finish line, and even it casts a sage look at life as it really is in ways that are liberatingly refreshing, you feel as if here’s a love that will go the distance way beyond the initial story-closing declarations of love where it’s implied nothing will be a problem from this point forward.
But of course it will, and it’s brilliant that Centre acknowledges that even as The Rom-commers plays out in the very way we want and need all rom-coms to end.
It’s breathtakingly clever and hugely emotional insightful, and it elevates this superlative rom-com even further up the rankings and into your heart than it already is and where it’ll stay for the durations because this is exciting, fantastical whip-smart funny love that ticks all the boxes in ways surprise and delight in extraordinary measure.
As Emma and Charlie’s issues and hopes and dreams clash and break and make themselves new again, all while it looks like they’ll never get to happy ever after, The Rom-commers is alive with words than dance across the page, emotions that fizz, pop and crackle with energy and raw, longing emotion, and a sense that their live, when it arrives and when they’ll actually admit to its existence, is going to be gorgeously, heart-stirringly spectacular.
Love should be all the good and wonderful things in wondrous abundance, and so it is in The Rom-commers which is far and away one of the best rom-coms out there, happy to be honest about hard life can be while serving up love as the antidote to all those ills in ways that feel and honest and absolutely there for the long and happy road ahead.