The Ugly Truth

Marisa –

The Ugly Truth, starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler, debuted on July 24, 2009, and like any other film, the usual slew of reviews appeared. According to RottenTomatoes.com only 15% of critics recommended the film.  While reading many of the reviews yields the impression that the film is a sign of the death of the romantic comedy, there is an even more interesting trend that becomes clear regarding the coarse language used in the film.  Quite a number of critics complained about the film’s vulgarity, and not because it was any more offensive than the average film but because it was so unexpected in a romantic comedy aimed mainly at women.

In her July 24^th review in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis chocked up the profanity as “a cynical, clumsy, aptly titled attempt to cross the female-oriented romantic comedy with the male-oriented gross-out comedy.”  Roger Ebert expressed a similar sentiment in his July 22^nd review saying the film suffered from, “the puzzling overuse of naughty words.”  He further went on to say that he found it, “amazing that this raunchy screenplay was written by three women.”  Dargis and Ebert were not unique in highlighting the film’s course language, nor were they unique in the reasons for their criticism.  A sizable section of critics thought the language was more suited to a film for men than for women.  Which leads me to ask a question: Who said women didn’t use a vulgar word or two every once in a while?

Certainly, romantic comedies are not typically the place one goes to find a profusion of profanity, but that does not mean women are naturally averse to them.  Rather, the choice to not have a lot of profanity in a film aimed at women is exactly that, a choice.  As a woman who, I will admit, cusses like a sailor, I find the assumption that only men can be a little foul-mouthed rather silly.  The Ugly Truth is certainly no more vulgar than this summer’s hit The Hangover.  In fact, The Ugly Truth is tame compared to that film.  However, The Hangover was celebrated for its filth.  Roger Ebert praised the film saying, “here is a film that deserves every letter of its R rating.”

So why is The Hangover allowed to wallow in its filth while The Ugly Truth is condemned for it?  There seems to be only one answer: women are not supposed to take as much joy in being vulgar as men.  Sure women can be included in gross-out comedies as the humorless shrew who needs to learn to lower her standards, like Heigl previously did in 2007’s Knocked Up, or as the hooker with a heart, like Heather Graham in The Hangover, but heaven forbid she act like one of the boys.

Certainly, there are examples of women in the genre of man-boy becoming man comedies who are allowed to be a little dirty.  Mila Kunis’s character in 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall comes to mind.  In that film Kunis’s character Rachel always seemed more in the role of the male in the relationship than Jason Segal’s character.  However, such representations are exceptions to the rule.  Forgetting Sarah Marshall stood out because of how it portrayed its female characters.  The film, written my Segal, was not criticized for making women seem too vulgar, but perhaps this is because a man wrote it.  Maybe men are allowed to write women as vulgar, but women are not. But even this cannot be the case since 2008’s Sex and the City and the racy show that spawned it were often written by men, but also faced similar criticism. Whatever the reason, critics are going to have to come to terms with the fact that men do not have the unique right to be vulgar.

Cliff –

I can appreciate the issue that you raise Marisa, even though I am a man. However, I am not convinced that the criticisms and/or support for The Ugly Truth and The Hangover are all too comparable, largely because of the genres they represent. The Ugly Truth, as we can agree, was intended to be a romantic comedy. The reason for the genre’s reputation for maintaining a relatively tame demeanor over the years is most likely because A) the intended audience is indeed mostly women, and B) most women do not find much room for vulgarity in romance. Tastes in comedy can and do range from all corners, and so to include the vulgar type within a film that is meant to sporadically initiate humorous reactions is, theoretically, a perfectly sound option.

The thing that critics are perhaps failing to articulate concerning their judgments on The Ugly Truth’s crudeness is that the extent and level that the film incorporates this brand of humor with the romantic aspect of the film turns out to be unfitting. The way I understand it, critics like Manohla Dargis felt the romance (which was unsuccessfully, or at least very artificially constructed) was overpowered by the off-color attempts at humor (case in point: the overdone vibrating underwear scene). This, by the way, is to push aside their feelings that those attempts at humor were largely ineffective.

The Hangover was advertised as and intended to be a movie for men. Both genders are obviously capable of valuing the other’s personalized brand of entertainment, and this is proven time and again. However, I suspect, and perhaps production studios do too, that it is easier for girls to enjoy movies geared to men than vice versa. A semi-crude romantic comedy like Wedding Crashers was a huge success because both genders appreciated it enormously, despite it being primarily male-oriented. Looking back this might be because there was a peculiarly even balance between the chest-beating caveman humor of the beginning and the monogamy-supporting romantic closure of the conclusion. The Ugly Truth does not have this equilibrium, and The Hangover never led on that it ever intended to want it. Thus, what this all boils down to is the failure to meet expectations, which you touched upon. Women and critics who saw The Hangover and enjoyed it knew exactly what they were walking into, whereas women and critics who saw The Ugly Truth might have been caught off-guard. Circumstances like this usually garner negative reactions, regardless of the genre.

The “indecency” of The Ugly Truth’s humor is, I suspect, an attempt to revive the romantic comedy that simply failed miserably. The romantic comedy is indeed on life support (aside from some of Judd Apatow’s films) because ingenuity within it has not been seen in years and is nowhere to be seen on the horizon. So, the only stopgap studios can come up with to stem this downward spiral is to appeal to more wide-ranging audiences, i.e. appeal more to both sexes as opposed to almost strictly women by way of integrating more adult-oriented comedy. What The Ugly Truth gets reduced to, if this is the case, is a gimmick. Critics who chastise the film for its language and brand of comedy, then, probably do so because they sense this gimmick and it leaves them with a bad taste in their mouths due to the realization that the romantic comedy’s slow death is no more delayed than before the film’s release.

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