It’s possible that Sweet Home Alabama (2003) is a really great movie. Or a really great romantic comedy. These are supposed to be two different things. It’s true that it leans heavily on the tried-and-true “coming home to heal” formula, a romantic comedy standard; an Alabama girl ditches the accent, moves to New York City, and transforms herself into a wildly successful fashion designer engaged to the son of the city mayor. The one problem? She’s still hitched to the boyfriend back home, the one who got her pregnant in high school, the one who refuses to sign the divorce papers. She’ll have to drive all the way back to Alabama (“come home to heal”) and convince her ex-husband to fully divorce her. As it turns out, she can’t, and he won't: she’s still in love with him, and he with her.
Who knows what makes a movie great? The question is impossible. One aspect that seems to move a text from good to great is the extent to which it plays, riffs, and comments on its own genre. It is not enough for the text to be only self-aware. Arguably a postmodern sensibility, this is how mediocre works of art beg critical recognition for the mere fact that they know what they are; that, because its creators have signaled as such, the artwork means something because its authors have let it be known that every artistic decision was intentional. The fact of intentionality, in a circular logic, must be proof of the work's profundity.
Is Sweet Home Alabama profound?
I will say that, before Sweet Home Alabama, there were already romantic comedies where the leading woman deeply embarrasses herself in front of her romantic interest; it is a mainstay of the genre. Intestinal distress comes at an inopportune time (Two Weeks Notice (2002)). How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days (2003) is nothing but a journalist enacting the over-the-top, mortifying gestures of a love-obsessed woman in order to win a bet. Whether or not Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama embarrasses herself more than any lead in any romantic comedy I’ve ever seen, and I think she does, is not the point, as this would only signify awareness. However, other than Sweet Home Alabama, the closest parallel being Thirteen Going on Thirty (2004), very rarely are there longterm consequences. Very few romantic comedies dedicate almost a third of the screen time, as Sweet Home Alabama does, to the leading woman proceeding to apologize in the aftermath of an embarrassing incident, demonstrating a very real character growth not often seen in a genre that prioritizes relationship dynamics over individual characterization and thus capitalizes in cutouts rather than three dimensional persons.
What was the embarrassing incident? Witherspoon crashes her ex’s date at the only bar in town and, during a drunken game of pool, outs her childhood best friend as gay in front of the entire town—in the Deep South. It’s another trope that Sweet Home Alabama fulfills only to turn around and critique: the omnipresent gay best friend. Nearly every heterosexual romantic comedy is populated in the margins with gay characters whose only plot function is to balance out the overwhelming straightness through “positive” gay representation, a notable example being He’s Just Not That Into You (2009), which follows not one but three couples, all of them straight, and uses any remaining screen time to cram in queer sightings. Sweet Home Alabama not only problematizes the romantic comedy trope of the straight woman’s innocent relationship to a queer man but does so without dehumanizing him, characterizing him as a simple victim, for example, or making him into a flat, positive caricature. When Witherspoon goes to his house to apologize for outing him, she isn’t at a house at all but a plantation. His ancestors were slave owners; his family still benefits from generational wealth. In a yet more incisive twist, it is revealed that to become a notable fashion designer, Witherspoon had lied in interviews about her family being poor, instead claiming that she grew up on this plantation, and the elites of New York City, it is implied, for all their liberal melting pot sensibilities, found the idea of being descended from slave owners more acceptable than—quelle horreur!—growing up blue collar.
What makes a movie great? A romantic comedy great? It might be easier to say what makes a romantic comedy bad. A bad romantic comedy is formulaic and predictable, cute and sentimental. Their tropes are exhausted. They are pointless and fluffy. It would be better to spend your time watching a real movie, one that deals with real people, and real world issues, than a romantic comedy, which is only a distraction, and an escape from these things, rather than a reckoning.
It’s possible that Sweet Home Alabama is a really great movie.
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