How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days

by Shari L. Rosenblum

At first, it seems a bit bold. "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days?" you think, "I can do it in half that." But then you see the tongue in that cheekiness. This is, after all, a movie based on Jeannie Long and Michele Alexander's humor tract, subtitled, "The Universal Don'ts of Dating" - a book illustrated with self-mocking stick figures and stock advice you used to be able to get only from DC Romance Comics. Don't call him your boyfriend, don't call him too soon, don't call him at all. Hardly the sort of negativity one looks for in a romantic comedy. But if the romantic comedy features the scrumptious Matthew McConaughey giving his all to turn a girl on, and the adorable Kate Hudson giving hers to turn him off, you know it's all going to turn out just fine in the beautiful blonde end.

Kate Hudson is Andie Anderson, would-be serious journalist with a column at Composure, a Cosmopolitan-type magazine. Her beat? How-tos for all occasions. To save the name of a lovelorn colleague who just can't play by the Rules, she offers her dragonlady boss (Bebe Neuwirth, unlimitedly unappealing as always) the assignment named at the head of the book and the movie: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. For all the frill, Composure takes its tasks seriously. Andie is expected to really go out and do a guy wrong.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, just as boyish as Andie and friends are girlish, sporting goods adman Benjamin Barry (McConaughey) and his crew are trying to land a diamond account currently assigned by boss Robert Klein (ugh) to the siren duo Michael Michele and Shalom Harlow, who you expect at any given moment to start singing, "We are Siamese, if you please." Games people play and all, it isn't skill Ben puts on the table to win the account away from the femmes fatales. It's himself. He wagers his career advancement on the chance that he can make the woman of their choice fall in love with him in those - wouldn't you know it - very same 10 days. And then, in a surprising twist of fate from out of the blue, Ben and Andie become each other's tests of fortitude. And so it goes.

The first exchange between Andie and Ben is one of those ostensibly possible first time flirtations that no one is really smooth enough to carry off. The kind of dialogue it must be fun to write, and would be even more fun to actually have. Quick, snappy, sexy, successful. Once the game is afoot, unfortunately, the writing becomes less enviable, and the unraveling plot more evil-minded. (Is there any woman out there today who would actually send her date for a Coke in the last seconds of a championship basketball game? Has there ever been such a woman?). And we start to cringe, congratulating ourselves for never having gone so far as to create composite photos of future children with a new love, even knowing that the movie's gone the extra step so that no right-minded woman, however wrong-headed, can identify entirely with Andie's relationship ridiculousness. And when the movie plays too loose with the silliness, making it like a compendium of horror shared around a catty campfire to trash what one of last year's films called the "ex-files," the slack is picked up by the actors who, though they never mug for the camera, are at all times obviously playing to the crowd (he, always on the verge of exploding; she, in astonished disbelief that he's come back for more). Hudson has never been more like her mother, though she's lighter on the ditz, and McConaughey hits just the right marks.

Directed by Donald Petrie, of Mystic Pizza, which appears on a theater marquee in the background, from a screenplay by Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down), Kristen Buckley and Brian Regan (102 Dalmations), the film plays on typecasted images from which romantic comedy rarely varies. Women are very very feminine, even when they root for the Knicks, and the film touches on all of the stereotypes: bosslady, tomboy, needy girl, vixen, bluecollar mom. And men are boys being boys at all times. But it's all in the game, and the supporting actors lend the support that's needed. Kathryn Hahn and Annie Parisse, as namesakes of the book's authors Michele and Jeannie, play believable colleagues/girlfriends. Neuwirth and Klein, though they irritate me personally, each exude the hatefulness required for their roles. Michele and Harlow slither feline-like in performances that would be offensive in any other genre (hinting at that other side of girlfriend that porn seems to thrive on), and Thomas Lennon, who played a similarly minor role in last month's A Guy Thing, seems to always make me laugh. But none surpasses Adam Goldberg, who is, as always, charming in that nerdy way that carries every scene he's in.

To the dismay of its critics and the delight of its fans, romantic comedy is a formula genre. Meet cute sparks fly conflicts arise tears fall problems resolve lovers kiss hug live happily ever after. I don't want to give anything away here, but let's be frank. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is a romantic comedy.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
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