What Men Want
By Eric Cox
Hitch
Released by Sony Pictures Entertainment and Columbia Pictures
Rated PG-13 for language and some strong sexual references
Stereotypes abound in Hollywood movies, and it is a common complaint that the industry is particularly bad at providing quality roles for women.
This is one reason why actresses tend to flock to the romantic-comedy genre: Probably most of the great female characters from Hollywood movies you can think of were romantic-comedy heroines. Sometimes--though certainly not always--something about romance and the often-complex relationship between the sexes produces more rounded, interesting characters than many other genres.
Take, for example, the new romantic comedy Hitch.
Will Smith portrays the title character, Alex 'Hitch' Hitchens, a so-called date doctor who counsels men on how to overcome their natural instincts in order to win the hearts of the women they admire. His newest client is Albert Brennamen (Kevin James), an accountant enamored with one of his wealthy celebrity clients, Allegra Cole (Amber Valletta).
Allegra, who has recently broken up with her boyfriend, is also being closely watched by a tabloid gossip columnist, Sara Mendes (Eva Mendes).
By coincidence, Hitch meets Sara in a bar and impresses her by not hitting on her. He follows up later with a call to her office and talks her into having breakfast with him. Hardly a date at all. She reluctantly accepts.
Hitch, however, has in fact planned an elaborate date for them, designed to melt Sara's heart. Unfortunately, everything goes horribly wrong. He has never been so unnerved around a woman before. Ordinarily suave and smooth, with a keen understanding of what women want, suddenly Hitch finds himself unable to do anything right around Sara.
Meanwhile, he tries to teach the extremely nerdy and self-conscious Albert how to behave like Don Juan, with only limited success.
Romantic comedies are very frequently built on miscommunication and mistaken identities--two people fall in love before learning that they are actually enemies, for instance.
In this case, Sara's objective is to expose Albert and Allegra's budding relationship in her column, whereas Hitch's job is to try to help Albert win Allegra's heart. Hitch has no idea that Sara is watching Albert and Allegra, and Sara does not know that Hitch is the renowned "date doctor." Moreover, Hitch can have no way of knowing that Sara has a very dim view of this alleged date doctor because of yet another misunderstanding involving her best friend.
The film contains several very funny scenes, although many of them have been given away in the previews. Most involve the interplay between Will Smith and Kevin James, which is terrific.
The same cannot be said for the interplay between Smith and Eva Mendes, however. Mendes is a strikingly beautiful woman, but she does not exactly light up the screen.
It might have helped if she had been given a more interesting character to play.
Like many female heroines in modern Hollywood movies, the character of Sara is a muddle. She is established early on as a steely career woman, bantering with her male boss as if they were equals. But later, when she believes she has been deceived by Hitch, whom she has come to care for--in other words, at precisely the moment when one would expect such a woman to confront a man with guns blazing--she begins to cry and runs away like an adolescent girl.
This doesn't matter as much as perhaps it should, however, because if the film is a love story, it is actually a love story between Hitch and Albert.
At its core, the film is really about the vulnerability a man feels toward a woman he finds attractive, and the ways in which he tries to hide this feeling of vulnerability with macho posturing--often with comic results.
The bond between Hitch and Albert--two men so seemingly different--is rooted in their common fears and anxieties about the opposite sex. If the film neglects its female characters, it is because they are really secondary to its main concern.
That is no excuse--every film, no matter how ambitious, is more interesting when all of its characters are more than mere cardboard cutouts.
On the other hand, if Hitch gives short shrift to its female characters, it also deserves credit for providing a more nuanced and accurate portrayal of men than one will see in practically any modern film not directed by Alexander Payne.
Eric Cox is a research fellow at the Sagamore Institute for Policy Research (www.sipr.org) and a movie columnist for TAEmag.com.
