Delayed Reaction: Must Love Dogs

Premise: A divorced school teachers gets back into the dating world.

 

The phrase "You don't know what you've got until it's gone" came to mind as I watched Must Love Dogs. You see, the night before, I watched This Means War, which ended up being the perfect counterpoint for Must Love Dogs. Let me explain. When Must Love Dogs came out (2005), it was the tail end of a pretty great era for RomComs. People like Sandra Bullock, Nora Ephron, Hugh Grant, Meg Ryan, and Julia Roberts shepherded audiences through over a decade of really solid Romantic Comedies. There was a formula that really worked. By the time Must Love Dogs came out though, people were pretty tired of that formula. Reviews for the movie were quite negative. The consensus was that we all liked Diane Lane and John Cusack, but they deserved better and more interesting material. Soon after this, RomComs started to change. They got raunchier (Knocked Up) or higher concept (Mr. & Mrs. Smith the same year as Must Love Dogs). That next decade was filled with RomComs that got further and further away from the proven formula, until you get to something like This Means War. I liked that movie well enough, but it really misses the mark. There's little romance. I wasn't rooting for any potential pairing. And, the action that it traded off the romance for wasn't good enough to justify the decision. When I saw Must Love Dogs the day after watching This Means War, it was a welcome change of pace.

 

The things that Must Love Dogs was panned for when it came out are the exact reasons I liked it now. It's formulaic and not surprising. Good. I don't want some crazy twists. I want Diane Lane and John Cusack to get together and be happy after some light conflicts. This movie is a great example of why I separate my Reactions into "Movie Reactions" (New films I see in theaters) and "Delayed Reactions" (Movies I see at home, normally older ones). They really are two different practices. Movie Reactions are a response to the moment. They can be a temperature check of the moment. There's value in that. When there were a dozen movies just like Must Love Dogs coming out every year, it was fair to criticize it negatively. Thinking about it like this makes it easier to understand how something like Singin' in the Rain wasn't considered a classic from day one. Delayed Reactions are an attempt to review a movie out of the contemporary context. I'd say it's maybe a more objective look, but I don't think it's necessarily a better practice. I tend to come out overly harsh in my Reactions of older movies since I lack the context of the moment when they were released to appreciate what they did at the time. For example, I could watch a movie from 1940 with really progressive views on race for the era that are retrograde by today's standards. At the time it was released, the film would've been properly praised. Watching it 80 years later, my Reaction would no doubt talk about how "this scene made me uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons" or "this element has aged really poorly".

 

This is all a painfully roundabout way of saying that I really enjoyed Must Love Dogs, but I don't disagree with the lackluster reviews it received when it was released. Diane Lane is really good. I enjoy her family dynamic. It's not a particularly believable family dynamic, and that's fine. They all like each other and are too much in each other's business. I don't mind that the town seems to only be populated by the same dozen people and they all live in the same two or three locations and go to the same two or three places. The movie loses track of what it's about a couple times. It starts by being about online dating, then becomes a sort of love triangle, and takes a few odd detours along the way. I appreciate how few stakes there are in the movie. It doesn't manufacture drama in that way. Diane Lane went through a pretty simple divorce. It sucked but there wasn't anything special about it. She wants to find someone, so she starts dating with the help of her family being pushy. She and Cusack have some fairly typical stumbling blocks and eventually end up together. The End. I like the simplicity.

 

Surprisingly good cast too. Lane isn't far removed from an Oscar nomination. John Cusack, Elizabeth Perkins, Stockard Channing, and Dermot Mulroney all feel like the exact people or kind of people the filmmakers wanted. It's got Glenn Howerton and Jordana Spiro a couple years before anyone would've known them from anything. Christopher Plummer seems delighted to be "slumming it" in a RomCom dad role. This is just about the best-case scenario cast for this movie.

 

You know, I feel like I'm too stingy with my Strongly Recommend rating. Like, if the movie isn't a masterpiece, I have to avoid using it. I'm not sure why I do that. I think it undersells how many of the movies I see that I like and appreciated watching. So, screw it...

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend