On Romantic Comedy and Drug Abuse: Stefan Beck Reviews From Hell and Serendipity

By Stefan M. Beck | Monday, October 22, 2001

This holiday season (that is to say, the corporate mega-season in which Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are just different names for the same blank check), Hollywood has something for everybody. Devotees of death metal, role playing games, and Goth culture are sure to enjoy the Hughes Brothers' From Hell, a grisly account of Jack the Ripper's murders in 19th century London. For soccer moms and hairdressers, there is director Peter Chelsom's new romantic comedy, Serendipity.

Whether or not the housewives or the Goth kids would care to admit it, there is precious little difference between these two movies. Sure, From Hell is stuffed to the gills with slit throats and dangling entrails, while Serendipity has little of either. And John Cusack is as charming in Serendipity as Johnny Depp is spooky and tormented in From Hell.

Beyond that, though, the movies have everything in common. Each is unabashedly predictable. While a formula may be expected in a romantic comedy, it's unacceptable in a murder mystery, whose audience deserves a few good surprises or scares. Each movie uses star power to compensate for its sloppy story and lifeless dialogue.

Plain and simple, these movies are perfect examples of Hollywood's laziness. They are ham-fisted manipulations of ideas that have worked in the past; they don't offer anything the slightest bit new.

Serendipity begins with John (John Cusack) and Sara (Kate Beckinsale) arguing over the last pair of cashmere gloves at a department store in Manhattan. John forks over the gloves, for which Sara repays him with a perfect night: the two have coffee together (at Café Serendipity, no less), go ice skating at Rockefeller Center, and talk a lot of crap so far removed from real first-date banter that it's almost maddening.

Unfortunately, both John and Sara are seeing other people. John, for one, doesn't care, but his foxy new friend tells him that if fate wants them together, it will bring them together. The audience, and poor John, wonder: hasn't it already?
Instead of giving John her phone number, like a normal girl would do, Sara promises to write it inside a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, to be sold later to a used book store. John writes his digits on a five dollar bill, which Sara promptly spends on candy. If the book or the bill find their way back to these star-crossed lovers, Sara and John are meant to be together. If not, que sera, sera.

The movie jumps ahead a few years. John has a beautiful but vapid bride-to-be. Sara is engaged to a long-haired freak named Lars, whose band plays Eastern-tinged music reminiscent of the Pure Moods compilation. Lars and his horrifying music provide a little comic relief, but his presence also creates confusion. If Sara is such a special girl, why is she in love with this guy?
John Cusack's real-life buddy Jeremy Piven plays his best friend, Dean, and the bumbling duo provides a few solid laughs. Admittedly, Cusack is always pretty damn funny. But that's just the problem. Classics like Say Anything, Grosse Point Blank, and High Fidelity have proven that John Cusack is the king of romantic comedy. He just doesn't belong in a movie as lame as Serendipity.

The same goes for Eugene Levy. He plays a disgruntled department store clerk who helps John track down Sara, using credit card receipts and sales records. Levy is hilarious even in this minor role, but the movie doesn't really deserve him. Molly Shannon, who plays Sara's best friend, Eve, isn't all that funny; the movie makes little use of her characteristic spastic energy.

The movie does little to address its basic moral problem. John's girlfriend loves him. Sara's boyfriend is so devoted that he tracks her down in Manhattan (where she is secretly looking for John), just because he misses her. So why should the audience like John or Sara? We're expected to root for them, without even noticing the people they abandon, the lives they ruin.

Hollywood is begging us to ignore the man behind the curtain. But when Sara and John are finally brought together, we can't help but imagine the awkwardness and guilt that would accompany this meeting in real life. The would-be happy ending is kind of creepy. Why didn't they call this movie Stalkers in Love?
From Hell stars Johnny Depp as Inspector Fred Abberline (the Victorian-era equivalent of an FBI profiler), who is hot on the trail of Jack the Ripper. Depp has visions of Jack's rippings before they happen, but only after he smokes a lot of opium and drinks a lot of absinthe. Drug use in movies is usually pretty boring (look no further than Depp's flops Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Blow), and this is no exception. Abberline's visions use every filmmaker's trick in the book—sped up and slowed down frame rates, filters, distorted audio—but they're still as corny and unconvincing as any Nine Inch Nails music video.

The Ripper's victims, of course, are the prostitutes of London's Whitechapel district. Chief among these hookers-with-hearts-of-gold is Mary Kelly, played by Heather Graham. Mary is squeaky clean and beautiful; her companions are toothless, syphilitic hags. The audience is expected to forgive this discrepancy because it sets up a totally unconvincing romance between Abberline and Kelly.
The girls witness the abduction of a wealthy painter and his wife, who is herself an ex-prostitute. Shortly after this, the Ripper takes his first victim. The movie's fundamental question is: what's the connection? If you can't figure it out more quickly than Inspector Abberline does, you aren't looking hard enough.

From this point on, the movie is less a mystery than a poorly-executed slasher flick. The murders are graphic, but they're all identical; at least in the real classics of the slasher genre, there's a little variety. By the time the movie makes its way to the second or third dead hooker, the audience is pleading for a climactic duel or at least a graphic love scene.

The movie wastes a lot of time commenting on social problems. When a kindly royal surgeon (played by Ian Holm) offers his knowledge and advice to Abberline, he also manages to diagnose and treat the Inspector's opium addiction. Mary takes offense to being called an 'unfortunate,' rather than a whore. Abberline goes head to head with the chief of the police, when the chief tries to pin the murders on the Jewish community.

None of this really serves any purpose, except to point out how progressive and socially-conscious Hollywood is. The problem is this is supposed to be a period piece, but all the characters act like they're straight out the 20th century. Once again, Hollywood has either insulted our intelligence or proven that it has none of its own.

The ending will be apparent to most audiences a good hour before it happens; suffice to say that it involves Encyclopedia Brown-style super-sleuthing, Freemasons, conspiracies, and a frontal lobotomy — and for all that, it still isn't particularly satisfying.

It is true that people tend to have lower expectations of horror movies and romantic comedies, but there are enough excellent movies in each genre to prove that it can be done. Considering that a ticket costs eight bucks now, audiences should stop letting filmmakers get away with movies like Serendipity and From Hell, and start demanding a little class and imagination. It's fair to say that Gremlins had more romance and more horror than both of these movies put together.

On Romantic Comedy and Drug Abuse: Stefan Beck Reviews From Hell and Serendipity

Article Tools

Related Articles