Runaway Bride Blu-ray Review
The One That Got Away
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, April 30, 2013
It took nine years after the success of
Pretty Woman
to reunite stars Julia Roberts and Richard
Gere with each other and director Garry Marshall, but their reunion was inevitable.
Pretty
Woman made a star of Roberts, revived Gere's flagging career and gave Marshall his first
blockbuster success as a feature director. They all owed each other another turn.
No one had managed to concoct a credible sequel to the trio's 1990 smash, which is hardly
surprising given that the romance at its core existed inside a fairytale bubble and couldn't be
transplanted anywhere else. (As Gere's Edward Lewis rightly observed, it was an "impossible"
relationship.) So Gere and Roberts simply took on the characters of another star-crossed couple
separated by a seemingly unbridgeable gulf that would, of course, be successfully bridged at the
end of two hours. The script for
Runaway Bride had been bouncing around for years, with a
succession of stars and directors attached. It required only minor nips and tucks (some of which
Marshall discusses in his commentary) to suit its stars and their director.
At the time of the film's release, Gere said in an interview that he and Roberts had glanced
surreptitiously at each other during the first reading and nodded, as if to say, "Yeah, we get this."
The movie-going public felt the same way. So eager were fans to see the two stars reunite that the
film did over $300 million in business worldwide—not as much as
Pretty Woman, but a solid hit
for studio partners Paramount and Touchstone. Still,
Runaway Bride has never attained the iconic
status of its predecessor, in large part because it is so obviously about showcasing stars, whereas
Pretty Woman was about telling a story—and in the process, a star just happened to be born. As
artificial and imaginary as its world may be,
Pretty Woman seems to evolve naturally from its
own internal logic. In
Runaway Bride, you're always aware of the directorial hand working the
gears of romantic comedy toward the inevitable result, while ensuring that the stars look
fabulous.
Maggie Carpenter (Roberts) lives in the small town of Hale, Maryland, where she helps her
father, Walter (Paul Dooley), run the local hardware store. Locally, Maggie is famous for having
left several men standing at the altar. The exact number and their identities are plot points best
left for the first-time viewer to discover.
Ike Graham is a New York newspaper columnist, whose feisty and frequently misogynist
commentary sparks controversy, not the least from his editor, Ellie (Rita Wilson), who also
happens to be his ex-wife. Like most writers, Ike is a born procrastinator. Sitting in his favorite
bar with a deadline looming for his next column and no topic in sight, he falls into conversation
with a Hale native (Reg Rogers) who tells him about Maggie. Shortly thereafter, Ike is typing
away. But in the last-minute rush, he neglects minor details like fact-checking. When Maggie
reads the column, she writes to the editor identifying numerous errors and lands Ike in serious
trouble with his boss.
A solution is proposed by Ike's friend, a photographer named Fisher (Hector Elizondo, a stock
player in the Garry Marshall company), who also happens to be Ike's successor as Ellie's
husband. Fisher suggests that Ike revive his journalistic credibility by writing an in-depth profile
of Maggie for the cover of
GQ, where Fisher has connections. Ike drives down to Hale, but
his initial effort to investigate anonymously proves futile, because too many people recognize
him from the picture that adorns his column. As a fallback, he begins charming everyone in
Maggie's life, including her latest fiancé, Bob Kelly (Christopher Meloni), a coach at the local
high school and a fitness fanatic, whose idea of the perfect honeymoon is to take Maggie
mountain climbing.
The more Ike gets to know Maggie and her world, the more intrigued he becomes, because . . .
well, just because. Aside from the fact that she's played by Julia Roberts, Maggie has no special
qualities other than her bewildering capacity to persuade men to propose marriage to someone
with a well-known history of dumping grooms at the altar. Exploring how she works that magic,
and what compels her to leap from one engagement to the next, might have supplied
Runaway
Bride with the tiny dose of grit that every good fairy tale needs to give it credibility. In
Pretty
Woman, for example, Vivian turns tricks, because she's broke, while Edward busts up
companies, because he was abandoned as a child by his wealthy father. Both characters have
been forced onto paths they might not have otherwise chosen because of deprivation.
Motivations are never clarified in
Runaway Bride, which, like too many romantic comedies,
suffers from lazy storytelling. Having created an intriguing puzzle of a character in Maggie, the
filmmakers can't be bothered to make any sense of her. The character isn't much more than a
plot function (the Girl) waiting for another plot function (the Guy) so that the two of them can
overcome a third plot function (the Obstacles) and ride off—literally, in this case—into the
sunset. One can't argue with the box office results, but revisiting the film after fourteen years,
one wonders what all the fuss was about. There isn't much there.
Whatever comic bite
Runaway Bride retains is due mostly to its supporting cast. As Maggie's
best friend, Peggy, Joan Cusack brings her reliable snap to a part that, in other hands, would be
purely functional. She's well matched by Hector Elizondo's Fisher, who puts an amusing spin on
lines that have no right to be funny. Maggie's sexually frank Grandma is a stock character, but
Jean Schertler underplays her just enough to be entertaining. An uncredited Laurie Metcalfe as
wedding cake baker Betty Trout (the name alone is worth a laugh) steals all her scenes, and
Donal Logue is funnier and more poignant in his brief appearance than either of the film's two
stars.
Runaway Bride Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
Lest anyone be tempted to dismiss my criticisms of
Runaway Bride as those of a cynical male
viewer who doesn't "get" romantic comedy, I hasten to add that they were first suggested to me
by another viewer, one whose devotion to the genre is second to none. A dedicated fan of
Pretty
Woman, she saw
Runaway Bride when it first opened in theaters and watched the Blu-ray with
me, vainly hoping it had improved with age. As the credits rolled, she proceeded to tell me
everything that was wrong with the film. I took notes.
Garry Marshall got his start writing character-driven comedy for such classic series as
The Dick
Van Dyke Show, and he became hugely successful as the creator of
Happy Days and
Laverne and
Shirley. His early films, such as
The Flamingo Kid,
Nothing in Common and even
Pretty Woman,
were equally character-driven, even if the characters were occasionally fantastical. At some
point, though, Marshall appears to have decided that it was enough to show attractive movie stars
falling in love; the rest would take care of itself. That's the only explanation for the treacly
holiday-themed anthologies that have comprised his most recent "films" (I put the word in
quotes, because they look more like animated issues of
People magazine). In hindsight,
Runaway
Bride may have been the turning point. If you're a fan of the film, the Blu-ray is fine (though
missing one of the listed features). However, if you'd prefer to remember Gere and Roberts as
they were in
Pretty Woman, let this one get away.
