It Could Happen to Anyone But You

In which Margaret releases her inhibitions and contemplates rom-coms more deeply than any of them would prefer.

Last Friday, I took myself to the movies to see the new rom-com sleeper hit, Anyone But You. I’d been meaning to ever since Beloved Damespal Cassie said the movie needed a grassroots campaign to save it from its terrible marketing– something which, in the meantime, it actually received from TikTok: Dancing to “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield, the movie’s expertly deployed credits song, became a viral TikTok trend and bingo-bango— America has its highest grossing R-rated romantic comedy since 2016. 

@nicolasandemilianoWe listen to this song religously so it made the movie 10x better

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Unfortunately, I didn’t love the movie as much as Cassie and TikTok do. It was vastly better than its terrible marketing campaign, but that just meant it was good enough to leave me furious it wasn’t better (and haunted by Sydney Sweeney’s ill-fitting swimwear).

DO YOU SEE WHERE THE BAND IS HITTING HER BACK?????? That is NOT okay, her Big Naturals deserve better than this, you guys!!!

There is so much potential here: Glen Powell is one of the best rom-com leading men of the last 30 years, the plot of Much Ado About Nothing provides great pacing, and the production had both the money to get “Unwritten” and the taste to use it exactly right. There is, in fact, one moment in the credits where Glen Powell, a pair of tiny white sneakers, and “Unwritten” come together and explode like fireworks and, for that alone, the movie is almost worth seeing. But for me, it was like a pint of Halo Top ice cream: close enough to the real thing that one can pretend, but dragged down by its cloyingly artificial aftertaste the second you really pay attention.

Over at Slate, Heather Schwedel was even more put off than I am, claiming that Anyone But You “portends a Dark Future”. Rather than rejoicing because its box-office success means we might see more rom-coms with theatrical releases and big budgets, she mourns that its success will make studios think “having all the right ingredients” (professionally beautiful people, a plot purloined from Shakespeare, money to throw at name stars and exotic locales, etc.) “means that everything will just fall into place.” She continues:

The way people talk about rom-coms often fails to acknowledge the simple truth that it’s really hard to make a good one. People remember the classics and recent classics, but they forget that for every How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, there was a Raising Helen. For every You’ve Got Mail, there was an Addicted to Love. Don’t remember that one? Exactly.

This observation isn’t untrue, but it undercuts her argument in two ways: first, it demonstrates that studios have always half-assed it when it came to making rom-coms. They have always believed they could just throw two hot people together on screen, make the beautiful woman do a pratfall, and eh, presto! Rom-com! No amount of genuine excellence from Anyone But You would have changed that. The aesthetics of a rom-com have always been easy to replicate, but the magic is hard to capture. 

Twenty years later, people are still trying to find copies of this dress, only now they call them “dupes.” Look on TikTok if you don’t believe me!

Which brings me to the second way she undercuts her argument: by citing How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days as one of the GOOD rom-coms we may never see again, an opinion that forced me to wonder if she’d even recognize a good rom-com were she lucky enough to see one. While I do acknowledge both that Matthew McCconaughey and Kate Hudson are preternaturally good romantic comedians, to the extent I remember anything about that movie, I remember hating it. It may be considered a classic, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

And it’s that realization that ultimately makes me sympathetic to the studios: one reason a good rom-com is hard to make is because it’s going to be a little different for everyone. In this way, it’s like pizza: it’s easy to recognize what’s really good, what’s striving for objective excellence, and getting close. But sometimes you don’t want an objectively excellent pizza. Sometimes you only want a categorically good one: something that tastes the way you imagine a slice downed by a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle might. 

The platonic ideal of nothing special pizza.

It isn’t the kind of pizza anyone travels across town especially to get, it isn’t going to win any arguments or awards, but it’s exactly what you want pizza to be in the moment you need it. And that pizza is going to vary a lot more from person to person than objectively excellent pizza does. What you’re looking for is as much memory as it is ingredients, a feeling as much as a taste. If you grew up with Greek crust, you’re going to want Greek crust. If you were raised in Papa John’s country, you’re going to need a sauce others find a little too sweet. You can’t help it: You just like what you like. Sometimes, the kind of rom-com I want is like that. It isn’t going to convert a hater, it’s not out here trying to change hearts or win minds. It just wants to be the right escapist fluff for the right person at the right time. 

There are people– lots of people, real people, honest people– for whom How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Leap Year are exactly that, even though I may find both films as repellant as Greek crust on a pizza. Similarly, a dear friend with generally great taste told me she found Set It Up, perhaps my favorite romantic comedy of the last 10 years, literally unwatchable. There are even people who don’t like Moonstruck!!! We can’t help it: We just like what we like.

Not even telling them to SNAP OUT OF IT can get the Moonstruck haters right with God.

I can’t blame the studios for being baffled by our fickle ways– I don’t think action movie aficionados struggle to form a consensus in this flighty manner. So even if I don’t like Anyone But You, I’m grateful to it, because it might convince studios to make more romantic comedies. And maybe, just maybe, one of the ones they make will be my little slice of heaven.  

These are four of my perfect slices. Please hop into the comments and tell me yours:

• It’s been a decade since I last watched It Could Happen to You (1994), but when I was a kid, we’d watch it all the time. I always thought I was the one who drove the many rewatches, but my brother recently informed me that he was actually the one who demanded it. We all loved it, though– me, my mom, my dad, and my brother. We loved Rosie Perez as Nicholas Cage’s scheming (future ex-)wife. We loved Stanley Tucci, in perhaps his earliest iconic rom-com role, as Bridget Fonda’s terrible heel of an estranged husband who steals her Macademia Nuts. But more than any of the others on this list, this movie is the one where I might just throw my hands up if asked to justify my love. This is the rom-com they sold three blocks down the street from my house. This is the one we’d order for birthday parties. Because it shaped my taste, it will always satisfy.

• About a decade ago, my best friend and I agreed that 27 Dresses (2008) is the platonic ideal of a rom-com. I cannot complain about Anyone But You is contrived because contrivances are actually one of the things I love about a rom-com. Is it realistic that one woman would have been a bridesmaid 27 times, and that all her bridesmaid dresses would be so baroquely awful? Not at all. Not anymore than a subway worker pretending to be engaged to a comatose commuter, or a cop and a waitress falling in love while splitting a winning lotto ticket. Implausible circumstances are part of the fun, but only when they are undergirded by plausible emotions. To wit: both Anyone But You and 27 Dresses feature long-dead mothers as plot points. But while Glen Powell’s dead mother isn’t even named, while she exists not even as actual backstory but more as a suggestion that backstory might exist somewhere, the dead mom in 27 Dresses really matters. Her absence shapes the sister dynamic between Katherine Heigl and Malin Akerman in a way that feels true, even if it’s also more brightly colored and poppy than pure realism would allow. The emotional realism brings heft to contrivance the way Rice Crispies bring crackle and pop to marshmallow, making a real treat. If you’ve only got the marshmallow, it’s nothing more than a mouth full of Fluff.  

• Set It Up (2018) is the movie you should watch instead of going to the theater for Anyone But You. It’s the rom-com that matches Glen Powell’s excellence rather than merely exploiting it. My love for this movie snuck up on me, it went from being “surprisingly charming” on first viewing to “maybe essential????” on its second. Zoey Deutch, Glen Powell, Lucy Liu, Taye Diggs, and even Pete Davidson are all perfect in this movie— I believe in and care about the emotional journey each one of them goes on. Besides which, the movie introduced the concept of “overdicking it,” which doesn’t mean what you think it does, but will prove necessary to your understanding of the world moving forward. Maybe like my wonderful friend Hannah, you will find this movie unwatchable. But maybe, like me, you’ll love it deeply. 

• Rye Lane (2023) is the newest movie on this list, and also the one I’ve watched most recently, maybe about a month and a half ago. But I fell for it instantly and I’ve been recommending it with great delight ever since. If Before Sunrise (1995) didn’t seem like it would storm off in a huff if you called it a romantic comedy, this is the movie it might be. Another description that feels right is that this movie feels almost as if Sex Education took a day trip to London. I can’t wait for more people to find it, so I hope this endorsement convinces you!

With that, I must leave you, friends. To reference another Will Gluck directed rom-com I vastly preferred to Anyone But You, let me say: you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

XOXO/Dame Margaret

Dames Nation: Keeping It Classy-fied

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