In the tradition of “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,” here’s the something nice for this review of The Proposal: It is nice to get a movie where the romantic female lead is more than a decade older than the romantic male lead and yet this age difference (and swapping from the Hollywood standard) is not treated as something remarkable.
That’s it. All out of nice things to say about this movie. This is not to say that The Proposal is a grindingly awful movie—it isn’t. Instead, it’s a grindingly mediocre movie that slogs through a story structured in ways that would have seemed tired 60 years ago when Betty White was starting out, and where very opportunity for originality is allowed to pass by unhindered.
Sandra Bullock is Margaret Tate, a top editor at Colden Books. She’s very much the stereotypical (in movies, anyway) career-oriented no-room-for-emotion-or-friendliness female executive. Nobody likes her, and she doesn’t appear to care.
Ryan Reynolds is Andrew Paxton, her beleaguered executive assistant who puts up with her nonsense because he sees her as the path to his own career as an executive.
Tate, who is supposedly extremely competent in compensation for being extremely unlikable, allows her visa to expire and must leave the country for a year, during which her American employer will not be allowed to employ her. Desperate, she blackmails young Andrew into agreeing to a sham wedding. A skeptical immigration official forces their hand and so their off to meet Andrew’s family in remote Sitka, Alaska (filmed beautifully by cinematographer Oliver Stapleton in Massachusetts).
There, she discovers that her frog of an assistant is actually the prince of “the Alaskan Kennedys,” as Andrew’s father seems to be the baron of half the commerce in southeast Alaska. They learn about each other over the course of the next two days, and things proceed in the way required of the romantic comedy genre, fulminating in the inevitable conclusion (I fear an insult to your intelligence by declining to state explicitly the nature of that conclusion but I seek to avoid another conversation with my editor on whether it is a spoiler to reveal an ending made obvious by the movie trailer passed on the way into the theater).
Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock do have some chemistry, and there are so many gags disbursed through the film that a few are bound to get at least a chuckle. Mary Steenbergen brings an actual acting performance to her role as Andrew’s mother, and it is nice to see Betty White looking so good at 88 years old, even if the movie abuses her with one failed slapstick scene, and another failure of writing.
Still, though, unless desperate for a “safe” date movie and it must be in the theater, there is nothing to recommend sending money on The Proposal. For parents, the movie does have a PG-13 rating though how worthy it is of that will depend on tolerance for sexual innuendo. The trailer for the movie kind of makes it look like a sex comedy but it really isn’t, even though it does have an extended scene with a completely naked Sandra Bullock with only a loofah and a forearm covering the vital bits (and she’s regularly seen in tasteful—but not prudish—nightwear). Beyond that, it is just an erection joke and gags involving a lucky blanket known as the Babymaker.
Personally, I’ll admit that I always take it as an insult to my intelligence when a movie asks me to accept that someone loves another without ever giving me a reason to believe that they might. This is very much the case with The Proposal, but it is also common to most very successful romantic comedies, so I may be alone in this complaint.
The Proposal is a Touchstone Pictures presentation
- Wide release on Friday, June 19.
- Directed by Anne Fletcher
- Screenplay by Peter Chiarelli
- Starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, Betty White, Mary Steenburgen, Craig T. Nelson
- Rated PG-13 for sexual content, nudity and language
- Running time 107 minutes
- Alex’s Rating: 3 out of 10
