Marry Me movie review: Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson's ageless charm is the only saving grace

Language: English

The romantic comedy is a rare genre that the streaming era just hasn’t been able to crack, with due respect to Noah Centineo’s growing fan club. And it’s not even like we were looking for the peaks achieved by the 80s and the early 90s, the Nora Ephron era. We would have been fairly happy with a Richard Curtis or Richard Linklater-grade output as well, given the current levels of scarcity. But somehow, network executives and writers alike seem to have forgotten how to make characters fall in love with each other — and do it in a way that’s believable, adorable, even aspirational.

And I think one of the reasons behind this generational failure on our part is that we focused a little too much on making these romances and romantic comedies “realistic”; which is to say, closer to the day-to-day rhythms of the young people they cater to. If you look at some of the terrible (but commercially quite successful) romcoms of the early 2010s, especially (Love and Other Drugs, Friends With Benefits et al), you’ll see what I mean. The problem with this approach is, even the most no-nonsense romance does not feel ‘realistic’ at an experiential level. Falling in love onscreen, therefore, isn’t really supposed to project a verisimilitude with real life—the artistic ‘license’ to enhance and exaggerate is therefore much greater with this genre.

Kat Coiro’s Marry Me, starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, gets this narrow aspect right—it’s quite aware of its innate ridiculousness, of its comfortable distance from real life. Lopez plays Kat Valdez, a character a lot like her—an internationally famous popstar with the world at her feet. Kat is engaged to her onstage partner-in-crime, fellow popstar Bastian (real-life Colombian artist Maluma) who, as it’s revealed dramatically mid-concert, is cheating on her. Incensed at his betrayal, Kat impulsively decides to marry a stranger from the audience, a sweet, divorced schoolteacher Charlie (Owen Wilson) holding up a ‘MARRY ME’ sign at his young daughter’s behest.

On paper, this setup lends itself well to what we know will follow next—an awkward, bittersweet passage of ‘integration’, where the odd couple will enter each other’s worlds for the first time. There will be moments of affection but there’ll also be clashes based on money, lifestyle, values.

We’ve seen this film before—and it’s hardly the only occasion Marry Me borrows heavily from Notting Hill. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, despite what you might think of the ‘borrowing’ in question. But Marry Me overdoes it quite quickly.

The writing is just too twee for words. It’s like every good idea for a scene was immediately scrapped in favour of something algorithmic, something market-tested to oblivion. There’s a scene where during a press conference, Owen Wilson launches into a legal/financial history of the institution of marriage…I just don’t know how any of the actors involved in that scene did it with a straight faced. It’s a dramatic scene that comes across as an SNL sketch. Lopez tops off the scene with a Girlboss Supreme line: “From now on, we pick the guy, we keep our name and we let him earn the right to stay”. It would have been a bare-minimum kind of a line in 1999; today it’s firmly in the ‘unintentional comedy’ department.

And yet, the film isn’t all bad, and most of that is down to the charisma and the Dorian Gray-like agelessness of the lead pair (no, seriously, these two can plausibly play characters between ages 30 and 55 and there’s just no way of knowing the correct number). Wilson’s goofy charm has been freeze-dried and industrially preserved since the 90s and Lopez is every bit as compelling. Her singing is also in fine fettle; she’s dynamite on the titular duet with Maluma, as well as another song called ‘Segundo’. Acting-wise, Lopez’s career has entered its Renaissance phase — I still feel she was robbed of an Oscar for her role in the outstanding Hustlers  (2019). This is not the Razzie-nominee of Gigli; this is a mature and accomplished performer who has learned to calibrate her performances.

Very few things about Marry Me will stay with you once the end credits roll. But it’s the type of undemanding, cosy one-time watch that you may choose thanks to sheer nostalgia, for a time when odd-pair romances were shoo-ins for that summer blockbuster slot.

Rating: 2/5 stars

Marry Me is playing in Indian theatres

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.