Runaway Bride (1999) – Dualist (Kinda)
Happy Valentine’s Day, my loves! I hope this Valentine’s Day serves as a reminder that love can take a million forms beyond romance and that even romance is less about the flowers and chocolates and expensive dinner and far more about being considered and respected and seen as the marvel that you are.
For this first Valentine’s Day with Review Roulette, I do want to do a romance film as they’re my favourites, so my first thought was “no-brainer, I’m doing Pretty Woman (1990) aka my favourite film of all time,” but then I took a sec and thought “I’ve written so much about Pretty Woman and people who know me from Twitter are probably a bit sick of it, and it goes against the spirit of these reviews to do a film I’ve seen that many times” and then I thought “I’ve never seen the other Richard Gere and Julia Roberts film though from the same director and with practically the same cast plus Joan Cusack.” And so here we are at Garry Marshall’s 1999 Runaway Bride, a batshit insane film that we are going to talk about below.
The Review Roulette wheel landed on dualist for this week, and I think the most obvious point of analysis is the double standards within the film (which are NUMEROUS) so we’re not going to do that. Instead, let’s cheat. Surprise! Dualist this week is going to refer to Garry Marshall’s two films Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride because I can and because I have things I need to say, so let’s call it a comparative study of these two films as a Valentine’s gift to myself. Self-love is important too.
Runaway Bride (1999) & Pretty Woman (1990) - Comparative
For those unfamiliar:
Pretty Woman is a film about Richard Gere, a high-strung career man who misunderstands women and is closed off from his emotions, meeting Julia Roberts, a woman he pre-judged as a user of men, and ultimately falling in love with her as they each realise they need the other’s help to find their true selves.
Runaway Bride is a film about Richard Gere – a high-strung career man who misunderstands women and is closed off from his emotions – meeting Julia Roberts – a woman he pre-judged as a user of men – and ultimately falling in love with her as they each realise they need the other’s help to find their true selves.
Genuinely, they’re the same but just slightly different in that Runaway Bride’s Maggie (Roberts) could be a similar origin story for Pretty Woman’s Vivian (also Roberts). They have the same skeleton and a similar end point but the way they get there is wild in Runaway Bride.
In all seriousness though, in Pretty Woman, the earlier of the two, Vivian is a sex worker in Beverly Hills and is picked up by Edward (Gere) who asks her to stay the week with him as his escort to work events and date nights. Over the course of this week, Vivian lets her vivacious energy lead their interactions, chipping away at Edward’s internal walls and healing his inner child. The two fall in love in one of the most beautiful displays of emotional respect, and by the end I truly do believe they are on their way to a profound love because that relationship was built on actually embracing each other’s emotional needs.
In Runaway Bride, the later of the two, Maggie has severe anxiety and has never been allowed to be her own person, and so she has gotten to the altar three times only to runaway at the last second trusting her instincts in that moment that this is not the right relationship for her. Ike (also Gere) is a columnist who writes “bitter diatribes about women” and needs prompting from Maggie to ask his ex-wife (who is also his boss) why their marriage ended 12 years prior as though he went through the whole divorce process without ever considering there was a reason for it, completely bemused that his ex-wife might have had thoughts and feelings and emotional needs.
Ike publishes a column about Maggie at the beginning of the film without corroborating the facts gathered from her latest drunken jilted groom, and Maggie promptly threatens to sue, getting him fired for poor journalistic practice. Bitter and angry, Ike heads to her small town and vows to vindicate himself by publishing a new column about how he was right that she is a “maneater” and that she makes men fall in love with her for sport. Over the course of aggressively stalking and embarrassing her, the two fall in love.
Now, comparisons can be made as I did above. In both, the pairs heal each other by assessing their past troubles and inviting self-reflection. But, again, the approach to that point is vastly different. Ike does confront Maggie and quite aggressively (but metaphorically) stabs at the heart of her commitment issues, making a very compelling case for why she is so lost and why she bolts at the altar listening to her instincts that she has been avoiding the whole time (because he’s projecting but that doesn’t dawn on him until she’s like “bro, you are literally the same?” also a bit aggressively). Vivian, on the other hand, wraps her legs around Edward in a bathtub, gently washing and caressing him until he admits that he is angry with his father after she had been forthcoming with her troubled childhood first making it a safe space for him to confront his own issues while literally wrapped in an embrace.
Both build up a lot of disrespect towards Roberts’s characters for a lot of the films before having Gere’s characters stick up for them, and as the most perfect callback, they both start in a shop in which Roberts is refused service. Vivian gets that iconic line “you work on commission right? Big mistake. Big. HUGE. I have to go shopping now.” because she’s a queen. We see her raw emotion just prior though when she admits to Edward that she has been judged and ridiculed and she feels ashamed prompting Edward to rearrange his day and take her himself, spending obscene amounts of his own money on a whole new wardrobe for her. Maggie decides she wants a more expensive wedding dress days before her wedding, and the shop clerk dissuades her, shaming her for having left the altar so many times before and telling her $1000 is far too expensive to spend on one of “your dresses”. Ike steps in and shames the woman right back, reminding her that her job is to sell dresses, not judge her clientele. They parallel each other beautifully and work (for me) as the fulcrum of both of these films, nearly identical scenes working toward the same plot resolution with that emotional work, but with different paths toward the end.
I could compare these two films all day but suffice to say they have such fascinatingly different trajectories to the same end point. Maggie confronts her anxiety as a root of expectations placed on her and works through her fears of commitment and the feeling of being trapped in the persona she adopted to please her partner. She does the work, intense emotional and mental work by the end of the film prompted by the intense accusatory exchange that also forces Ike to look inward and reflect on his apparent unwillingness to consider other people. Both Ike and Edward completely change the trajectory of their careers towards something more personally fulfilling, and when Edward realises his love for Vivian, Vivian is already on a trajectory of her own self-enrichment. We get there in both but through very different means (but both do highly disrespect Roberts’s characters for much of the films until she asserts her agency loudly, lays out some truths, and stands up against everyone else’s bullshit).
I think Runaway Bride has some very derogatory elements that ultimately are super evocative of 1999’s views of women and we could do without those. Ultimately, thinking about it as a companion to Pretty Woman, I think there are some really interesting comments on the different approaches to love and what love even means. Vivian and Maggie both start as people pleasers who carry pain and hurt from their pasts and need a confrontation of those pasts to be able to move forward with more agency. For Vivian that happens very early in the movie and for Maggie it is the entire plot, but I think there’s something powerful in those differences that exposes something quite pure about self-healing. And the same goes for Edward and Ike: the prompt is external from the romantic love interest, but the healing is entirely internal to be able to be the person they truly are and thus be able to start an honest and healthy relationship.
For two wildly similar yet dramatically different films, I think this is a wonderful encapsulation of the varieties of love. As long as your love, for whomever or whatever, is inspiring a self-reflection to be the best and most authentic version of you and as long as that love is respectful and supportive and feels like a warm embrace, the process is yours and yours alone to approve of. Whatever your love is this Valentine’s Day, I hope you have a wonderful one and speak your love out loud. Happy Valentine’s Day, loves.
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
A Personal Reflection
I know I am more of a fan of Pretty Woman than most people and I know it has its criticisms, but Pretty Woman (and Julia Roberts (and Julia Roberts’s red dress)) is one of the loves of my life because of the emotional prompts it gave me to heal. I have grown with that film, been watching it most of my life, and it has genuinely been a part of my emotional development as a person, encouraging self-reflection and growth and new interpretations of it with each new iteration of me. And I think that’s okay and good actually to have something so consistent, a visual representation of a human experience as a constant in your life as you change and grow and against which to measure your changing personhood. So, this year, along with my fiancé, Pretty Woman is my Valentine, and I wonder if you have a film that could be yours.