What Rom-Coms Can Learn from “Kicking and Screaming”

For my first month of The Rom-Com Project, I decided to focus on Ensemble Romantic Comedies. I received one recommendation for the 1995 film Kicking and Screaming, an independent film about a group of verbose, navel-gazing college graduates stuck in a state of arrested development, who do almost nothing and talk about it wittily.

I want to give the film a more detailed plot summary, but that’s a little difficult. The whole movie is really just about navel-gazing college graduates who talk too much instead of doing things with their lives – and I loved it.

This doesn’t surprise me. More than one person has recommended Downton Abbey to me with the promise that the show is filled with British people who sit around and talk, knowing that this aspect of the show would be a selling point to me. (They’re absolutely right and I will probably catch up on the show once the current TV season is over.) Therefore, it’s no wonder that I would love Kicking and Screaming. It’s funny, introspective, unpredictable, and an interesting look at a group of friends once they graduate college.

But, while I loved the movie, I wondered at the recommendation that I watch it as part of a Rom-Com Project. I wouldn’t call Kicking and Screaming a romantic comedy. In some ways, I wouldn’t call it a comedy at all, but a drama – or even a tragedy – that happens to be very funny.

The movie has an ensemble cast, but if it has a single main character, it would be Grover, played by Josh Hamilton. At the beginning of the film, during a graduation party, Grover’s girlfriend Jane (Olivia d’Abo) tells him that she plans to leave for Prague. He wants to stay in Brooklyn, so they break up. Over the course of the year, he sleeps with college freshmen and wanders aimlessly through his life. Jane continues to leave messages on his answering machine (because it takes place in 1995 and they still have answering machines, how quaint), and flashbacks reveal how the two met and first got together. At the end of the film, he makes an impulsive decision concerning Jane and…

Actually, I don’t even want to say what that decision is. Grover’s ending is so perfect that I feel like I would ruin it by writing it here, and I want everyone to see this movie.

That instinct to protect you all from spoilers is pretty rare. Usually I have no problem with putting the second half of the post behind a cut and saying, “Read at your own peril,” but I don’t want to do that here. It’s not an M. Night Shyamalan-type ending that needs to be kept under wraps because it’s such a huge twist OMG! Even so, I don’t want to tell you what the ending is. I want you to see the movie for yourself.

As you can tell, I loved this movie. Reviewing it from a feminist perspective and for the purposes of The Rom-Com Project is a little difficult because I got so wrapped up in the story and character interactions that the Feminist Critic part of my brain shut off.

And while I wouldn’t call the movie a romantic comedy (because the story is centered on friendships and personal issues rather than romance), I still think writers of romantic comedies – and ensemble rom-coms in particular – can learn a few lessons from Kicking and Screaming.

Lesson 1: Make the ensemble smaller.
A big reason I couldn’t get into Love Actually or Valentine’s Day was the size of the ensemble casts. They were just too darn big. I can’t bring myself to care about sixteen different people in eight different plotlines in the space of two hours. Writers need to cut some of their subplots out of the stories they tell if they want the audience to care. Heck, even Shakespeare fails to make me care about half of the characters in his comedies; Much Ado About Nothing has Benedick and Beatrice, but Claudio and Hero are boring, and The Winter’s Tale puts me to sleep as soon as Leontes and Hermione leave the stage. The only comedies that successfully invest me in all of the subplots are A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night – and, I suppose, The Comedy of Errors, but only because the story has very little depth and is just an enjoyably silly farce.

Cut your ensembles down, writers. Don’t feel bad. Even Shakespeare didn’t strike gold with all of his comedies.

Lesson 2: Give your characters lives outside of the pursuit of romance.
The characters in Love Actually and He’s Just Not That Into You and Valentine’s Day supposedly had careers and families and lives outside of romance and flowers, but I never saw them. All they did was whine about the holidays or boys and girls and/or spend time trying to romance or have sex with each other.

Meanwhile, the characters in Kicking and Screaming had no lives, but that was the point. They were all stuck in their post-graduation laziness and ennui. I still learned more about them in the first ten minutes of the movie than I did about the other characters in two hours. The moment that made me realize that I would love this movie occurred in the first conversation between Grover and Jane: he uses a good turn of phrase to communicate a feeling and she immediately starts to write it down in her notebook, and he asks her if they can have one conversation that isn’t about one of them trying to collect material for their stories.

Grover will spend the rest of the film running in place, and kicking and screaming his way into adulthood (hey, that’s the name of the movie!), but in that one scene I learned so much about him and his relationship with Jane.

I don’t think the reason I loved Kicking and Screaming and felt “meh” about Love Actually and “meh-er” about He’s Not That Into You and BLINDING HATRED towards Valentine’s Day was that the former is a tragicomic look at life, and the last three are more traditional ensemble romantic comedies. I think writers can tell traditional love stories about multiple people while giving us more complex characterization. They just have to try harder.