by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After House of Darkness Lifetime changed tone dramatically (something they usually
don’t do on their Saturday night prime-time movie double bills!) and showed The
Ugly Truth, which turned out not to be a Lifetime TV-movie but a feature film from 2009,
made at Sony’s Columbia studio (and with a title strikingly reminiscent of The
Awful Truth, Columbia’s screwball comedy
classic from 1937) and a genuine, if not altogether successful, attempt to
revive the screwball comedy in the modern era. Directed by Robert Luketic
(whose last name sounds more like an electroplating process than a person) from
a script by Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith, The Ugly Truth stars Katherine Heigl as Abby Richter, producer of a
low-rated news/talk show on a local TV station in Sacramento. Her show is
bombing in the ratings, and the station manager — who worked there when it was
family-owned and, like Abby, is having to adjust to the new management of the
big media corporation that just bought it — is badgering her for ideas on how
to boost ratings. One night Abby is at home when her cat steps on the TV
remote, accidentally turning it on to “The Ugly Truth,” a public-access cable
show hosted by a male-chauvinist pig named Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler, before
he started making the … Has Fallen
movies and saving the life of the President of the United States from
terrorists in every one).
Chadway’s schtick is attacking women on the air; he takes calls from them
and when they call him out, or try to, on his view of women as manipulative
bitches who will lead men around their little fingers just for the hint of an
offer of sex, he uses sound-effects machines to ridicule them and ultimately
hangs up on them. (Rush Limbaugh’s show began in Sacramento and he pulled
similar stunts on women callers, announcing he was about to perform a “caller
abortion” and then playing a sound effect of a flushing toilet as he hung up on
them.) Unfortunately, the station manager also discovers Chadway and
immediately hires him, whereupon his antics boost the ratings of Abby’s show
while making her physically ill because she wanted to do a serious news program
and instead she’s airing footage of Chadway wrestling half-naked women in
Jell-O and making salacious comments on how good they taste. From the moment we
see the hate-at-first-sight between Chadway and Abby we just know — at least if we’ve seen more than about 12 movies in our
lives — that they’re going to end up together as a couple at the fade-out, but
the writers and director Luketic take their sweet time getting us there as they
offer us another suitor for Abby, Dr. Colin Anderson (Eric Winter, who isn’t as
self-consciously butch as Gerard Butler but frankly did more for me), who’s not only handsome but nice, intellectual, well-to-do
(they meet when Abby injures herself climbing a tree after her cat and Colin
just happens to come upon her — they’re
next-door neighbors — and bandages her ankle) and meets all the 10 points on
her checklist of what she wants in a man — something for which Michael
ridicules her, saying that the only men who would meet all 10 points are Gay.
(I remember articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and other local papers in the late 1970’s that young
straight women in the city had two sets of boyfriends: the upper-middle-class
Gay men who would take them to concerts, musea and other refined intellectual
events, and the proletarians they would need if they actually wanted their
ashes hauled.)
Michael makes a deal with Abby: if she’ll follow his instructions
exactly on how to court Colin, he will
quit the station if she can’t get Colin to have sex with her. Accordingly Abby
lets Michael wire her ear so he can follow her and Colin on their dates and
give his smirking advice in real time — at one point he tells her, when she and
Colin are at a baseball game, to eat her hot dog slowly and sensually
(obviously to suggest that this is how she would go down on Colin if he gave
her the chance), and while she attempts to do that the hot dog flies out of its
bun and creates a crisis where she spills a drink on Colin’s lap, then tries to
clean it up — and a hidden camera at the ballpark broadcasts the incident on
the Jumbotron (Sacramento’s minor-league team must have been playing a
particularly boring game that night) and it does look like she’s going down on him then and there. There’s
also a sequence in which Michael buys Abby a pair of panties with a
remote-controlled vibrator attached — he’s told her that she needs to start
masturbating so her body will once again know what sex feels like and therefore
she’ll be able to respond to the real deal — only she’s summoned to a meeting
with executives of the corporation who bought her station, and in the middle of
their dinner meeting Michael’s obnoxious nephew (his sister’s son, whom he
baby-sits for frequently and who seems to be the only person he actually loves
in any sense) steals the remote, starts
playing with it and sends Abby, in the middle of a work-related dinner, into
her first orgasm in years. It all comes to a head (so to speak) at a conference
in Los Angeles — this is on the weekend when Abby and Colin were supposed to go
to Lake Tahoe and actually get it on after all the dating — instead Michael
suggests that Abby bring him along on the conference and they can be alone in
their hotel room after it’s over but before they go back — only Abby loses all
her self-control and slobbers all over Michael in the hotel elevator, thereby
confirming our movie-conditioned expectations that she’s going to end up not with the nice-guy doc but the male-chauvinist boor she’s
been resisting, personally and
professionally, all movie.
The climax occurs during a big balloon race Abby’s
station is covering (Michael has left for a competing station and Abby has
hired a replacement who’s even worse, and she pulls him off the air when he
makes a remark that seems to be approving of rape), only Abby and Michael end
up in the same balloon and can’t get away from each other. Needless to say, it
wasn’t hard for me to figure out how this would have been cast in the classic
era — my putative 1930’s version would have had Carole Lombard as Abby, Clark
Gable as Michael and Ralph Bellamy (who else?) as Colin — and it would have
been considerably subtler (thanks to the Production Code) and also considerably
funnier; Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler aren’t bad casting for these old-movie characters now (though Butler
looked considerably more at home as an action hero in the … Has Fallen movies), and though there are some nice touches (like
Michael being interviewed by Craig Ferguson — playing himself — and being
momentarily nonplussed when Ferguson plays his game on him, asking him point-blank who was the woman who
hurt him so much it left him with such a low opinion of women in general) in
the script, for the most part it’s a pale copy of the screamingly funny
originals for this sort of movie from the 1930’s. And yet, as annoying as it
got sometimes (particularly in the characterization of Michael — one imdb.com
contributor thought the writers should have made the boy Michael’s son instead
of his nephew and had him raising the boy as a single father after the mother
had left him, which would have added humanity and pathos to Butler’s
characterization), The Ugly Truth was
also reasonably amusing and a breath of fresh air, both figuratively and
literally (given how much of it takes place either outdoors or in well-lit
interiors), after the oppressive gloom of House of Darkness!
