Film Review | Something Borrowed

Romantic comedies are easy to hate because they’re vulnerable to many pitfalls: cheesiness, shallowness and the rest of it. Anything that uses love as a hook is automatically suspect, and when it relies on formulaic plot points to get through, this is increased by a thousandfold.

Still, great things can be done with the genre. Shakespeare did a pretty good job of it with Much Ado About Nothing and Love’s Labours Lost. And more recent examples exist too – just look at Ten Things I Hate About You (loosely adapted from The Bard’s Taming of the Shrew, to be fair), Easy A and (500) Days of Summer – they were witty, uplifting and cute, and there’s no intrinsic reason why all romantic comedies shouldn’t possess these qualities because at the end of the day, we all want to be reminded that love is something to be enjoyed, not something we should be embarrassed about.

But the dross is just too difficult to ignore, and try as we might, it will keep bubbling to the surface every other week. Romcoms are as ubiquitous now as Westerns were few decades ago, and their function seems to be to plug the box office gap between holiday seasons, when the superhero onslaught isn’t as heavy as usual.

Something Borrowed is a perfectly polished example of such a specimen.

It tells the story of the put-upon New York attorney Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin), who has been subservient to her best friend Darcy (Kate Hudson) for most of her life – to the point of allowing her law school crush, Dex (Colin Egglesfield), to fall pray to Darcy’s ditzy, bratty ‘charms’.

After Darcy throws a surprise birthday party for Rachel – and as Dex and Darcy’s marriage date edges closer – the birthday girl has a little too much to drink… and finds herself in bed with Dex the following morning.

With romance rekindled at the worst possible time, the meek Rachel suddenly has some tough decisions to make, but whether or not she will listen to the shrewd advice of her aspiring novelist friend Ethan (John Krasinski) – the only one who knows what exactly happened between Rachel and Dex – remains a slim possibility.

The setup is ripe for saucy twists but what ensues – as spun from the popular chick-lit novel by Emily Giffin – is anything but interesting. For all their inherent problems, I’ve always assumed that romcoms should – putting paid to that second syllable – at least try to be funny. But Luke Greenfield’s film, shot in the same ‘pleasant’ glaze that characterises most examples of the genre and animated with the same perky pace and a similarly perky cast, appears to be more concerned with the ethics of friendship than the amusing booby-traps of love.

Which would be fine if what ensues has any depth… but going by what we’re given, Rachel is simply a doormat, Darcy is simply deplorable and the man that their non-relationship falls into compromise for comes with a similar lack of distinguishing features save for chiselled good looks, a comforting smile and, judging by his decision to marry Darcy, equal dollops of stoicism and stupidity.

But as most of these things go, it is practically polished to perfection. The adorable Rachel is adorable, the deplorable Darcy is deplorable (and just about amusing as that-drunk-you-love-to-hate)… and the plot is constructed so that not a single aberrant element is allowed inside. Really, a film that adheres to formula with so slavishly could not come with a better title.