A LIFE LESS ORDINARY (1997)

The screwball comedy, from what I remember of my limited studies, is a film genre from the late 30's/early 40's in which an attractive man and woman fall in love while madcap hilarity reigns.  Typically, one of the couple is rich and the other is not to accentuate the differences between the man and woman although usually there could be any number of things (fiances, wild animals, eccentric relatives) to help come up with reasons to keep the couple from announcing their love for each other until near the end of the movie.  There's a high degree of farce and slapstick, usually a wedding at the end, there's wacky supporting characters, there's usually clever and witty repartee, the female protagonist is strong, witty and self-sufficient, the male character radiates charm.  Somehow Howard Hawks even managed to trump the genre by making it throwing in some pressing social issues in His Girl Friday, his screwball comedy remake of the Front Page (although many will tell you that screwball comedy turns on ideas of class and gender issues).  Screwball comedies have aged well; fast-paced wit usually doesn't go out of style.

No scientist today, or for many years, has tried to bring back theories concerning the luminiferous ether.  They would be scornfully mocked, or perhaps heaped with mocking scorn.  But filmmakers still try to remake the screwball comedy; after all, a film genre is not like a scientific theory.  When it works, it works, whether or not it's in fashion at the time.  Interestingly enough, critics respond to new screwballs as if someone is discarding the laws of relativity, or perhaps advising them of treating a medical condition with leeches.  Scornful mocking scornfulness.  With maybe the exception of neo-screwballs What's Up, Doc? from 1972 and Demme's "Something Wild" from1986, I can't think of any neo-screwballs that were well-received by modern critics.  Who's that Girl?, the remake of Born Yesterday with Melanie Griffith, most of Barbra Streisand's later career, etc., etc.  It's the curse of the screwball; filmmakers who mention it in interviews for their movies are setting themselves up to get clobbered.

Strangely enough, no interviews I saw or read with Danny Boyle and John Hodge mentioned "screwball comedy" in talking about A Life Less Ordinary.  And none of the reviews I read used the term either.  But, boy, did they clobber this movie.  Check out this comment from the Tucson Weekly:  "The third film from the team that brought us Trainspotting and Shallow Grave has the same startling sense of composition and color as these previous efforts, but none of the wit."  Or this one from NewCityNet:  "'A Life Less Ordinary' is a promising first feature, ideal as a modest "lifestyle accessory," to take a phrase from one of its characters. But when you realize that it's the third feature from the creative combine that brought us "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting," it's a tepid disappointment."  Like Wile E. Coyote, the filmmakers of A Life Less Ordinary stepped out of the way of a speeding truck of screwball comedy only to be pounded by the falling anvil of critical expectation of their own careers.

This long, long, long intro is all an aside to explain my reactions to A Life Less Ordinary.  I loved it.  I still haven't seen Shallow Grave, or Trainspotting, and, honestly, I've only seen a few screwball comedies, so maybe I'm a critical aberration.  Class structure, gender scatter, yadda, yadda, to me the two secrets to screwball are:  Is the couple attractive enough and has enough chemistry that you want to see them get together?  And does the film keep you entertained until they actually do so?  A very big yes in both of those cases here.

In A Life Less Ordinary, Ewan McGregor is Robert, a janitor with dreams of being a writer. Cameron Diaz is Celine, the rich daughter of McGregor's uber-uber-uber boss (he runs the company).  Delroy Lindo and Holly Hunter are Jackson and O'Reilly, angels given the ultimatum to either bring the couple together or stay out of heaven forever (God isn't too happy with the high divorce rate).  At O'Reilly's insistence that the secret to romance is "Peril, Jackson, peril," the two angels go about helping events accelerate into kidnapping, cross-country flight, and gunplay.

I don't want to give away more about the movie, since the film gets so many of its laughs from trying to throw in anything that you wouldn't expect ("Who are the twisted freaks who made this freakish thing?" one of my roommates asked me while watching this).  Ironically, there really isn't anything startlingly new in A Life Less Ordinary; the scene in which the hostage coaches the kidnapper on how to make a ransom call demand, for example, is an old chestnut.  What is surprising is how well executed it all is.  I laughed at Cameron Diaz's recreation of a terrified hostage; I chortled at Holly Hunter's battered maniacal angel crawling up the front of a speeding truck; I guffawed at Ewan McGregor's open weeping while digging his own grave.  To me, the karaoke musical number isn't surprising.  It's how good it was that made me happy.  The film is dark and cynical, admittedly, but so were many of the original screwballs.  They had teeth, which they used to bite as well as smile.  A happy ending is to be savored, and shouldn't be taken for granted, no matter how predestined it is.

I guess since the element of surprise is A Life Less Ordinary's greatest weapon, my laudatory review sets the film up for disaster for the casual viewer (much as the expectations for Boyle, Hodge and McGregor did for the critics), while all the official scorn heaped on the film will help make it a lost gem for the viewer who stumbles across it in the video store. Pretend then, if you will, that this review never happened, and just go out and rent A Life Less Ordinary.  You might be stumbling across one of your new favorite romantic comedies.

More about this movie

A really nice site about screwball comedy

And a site about Wile E. Coyote that I had fun looking at while writing this review

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All written material on these pages is © 1997 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.