r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night (March 10) at 10 p.m. Lifetime showed a theatrical movie from 2008, a thoroughly enchanting romantic comedy called 27 Dresses. The main character is Jane Nichols (Katherine Heigl), who quite literally is always a bridesmaid and never a bride. The 27 dresses of the title are the pens she’s worn to the various weddings at which she’s been a bridesmaid, some of which were beautiful,some not so beautiful and some downright ghastly. Jane works in the “Commitments”department of a major newspaper called the New York Journal (an obvious mashup of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – I joked that in this universe there’s probably a paper called the Wall Street Times). She’s had an unrequited crush on er immediate supervisor, George (Edward Burns). The proverbial complications arise when Jane’s sister Tess (Malin Akerman) suddenly moves back to New York after a few years out of town and instantly sets out to seduce George. She constructs an elaborate identity for herself as a pet-loving vegetarian (she actually eats meat and couldn’t stand the Nichols family’s dog) because that’s what she thinks George wants. Also in the mix is a young writer for the New York Journal named Kevin Doyle (James Marsden), who’s assigned to the “Commitments” section even though he can’t stand writing about weddings and is cynical about the whole institution of marriage. No doubt anyone who’s seen more than about four or five movies in their life will immediately see that Kevin is a much better match than the stuck-up George, who uses Jane as what in the 1930’s was called an “office wife,” relying on her to keep track of his schedule and run demeaning little errands for him.
Through most of the movie Jane seethes with frustration as Tess not only goes after George but lands him to the point of a wedding proposal – it sums up the whole movie when the waiters at the fancy restaurant where George intends to propose to Tess at first mistake Jane for the bride-to-be as they test-unvein the banner that reads,”Will You Marry Me?”, and we can readily imagine how that makes Jane feel – only Jane getsher revenge when Tess asks her to do a slide show to celebrate their upcoming wedding. Tess gives Jane a script and warns her not to deviate from it by as much as a comma, but the images Jane selects from both Tess’s and George’s archives expose all Tess’s lies about herself. George angrily stalks out of the wedding shower and breaks off the engagement, then in a turn of events I wasn’t expecting he kisses Jane in the office and I briefly wondered whether writer Aline Brosh McKenna was going to flip our movie-conditioned expectations on their heads and have George and Jane pair up together after all, but in the meantime Kevin and Jane have already spent a night together after their car got caught in a rainstorm. I recalled the similar sequence from James Whale’s marvelous 1934 film One More River, in which the couple stuck in the car are an abused wife and the friend who loves her and wants to get her away from him, only in that film it’s clear they do not have sex with each other while in 2008 McKenna and director Anne Fletcher leave at least a strong hint that they did. (27 Dresses is, among other things, a strong argument for giving women more opportunities to direct films; I suspect the movie would be quite different and far less interesting if the director and writer had both been men.) So instead of fulfilling the unrequited passion Jane had for Gorge all these years, once he finally kisses her she feels nothing. Eventually Jane and Kevin get married, and at their wedding George and Tess re-meet and approach each other as if they’ve just met, wth the expectation that they’ll end up together but on a more honest basis.
27 Dresses is a marvelous romantic comedy, and I came up with a cast list for a putative 1930’s version of the same story: Barbara Stanwyck as Jane, Cary Grant as Kevin, Fredric March as George and Carole Lombard as Tess. (Charles reminded me that in the 1930’s producers almost never put that many stars in one film; he said the two women would probably have been major stars but they’ve gone cheaper in the casting of the men – say, Warren William and POhillips Holmes.) Though the putative 1930’s version of 27 Dresses would have had the same problem as an actual late-1930’s film, Holiday (the 1938 version with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant) – the star chemistry between the leads was so obvious there was really no suspense in how it was going to turn out – that’s not a problem with the 2008 version even though James Marsden is hardly in Grant’s league as a romantic comedian (but then, who was, then or since?). There’s a nice scene in which Kevin and Jane get drunk in a bar and do a sing-along to the Elton John-Bernie Taupin song “Bennie and the Jets,” hilariously getting the words outrageously wrong. I also liked the final credits, sequence, which featured the names of the principal cast and crew members in a mockup of the “Commitments” section of the New York Journal (both Charles and I recalled seeign this credit sequence before, probably on Lifetime while waiting for another movie to begin). Overall 27 Dresses is not the kidn of movie I would usually seek out, but I’m glad I caught up with it: it’s hardly a great film, but it’s a marvelously entertaining romantic comedy that artfully plays with the expectations of the genre even while delivering the goods.+
