Marry Me: A Valentine's Special
The JLo X OwenWilson Romance We Didn't Know We Needed
I have nothing bad to say.
If you’re with your significant other for this cupiddy day and you’re scrolling through your multiple streaming services and you’re in the mood for a romcom that is only feels good? This is the movie for you. No cap.
Or maybe if you’re a single Pringle and you’re feeling for a touch of spice on this otherwise normal Monday, this is a good movie to start out the week.
I guess my only complaint was that my face hurt from smiling so much. After riding melodramatic shows from start to finish and struggling through poor communication and toxic behaviors, this love story about choosing happiness after all the rain has fallen is one to enjoy with a bag of your finest popcorn.
Marry Me is humorous and human and musically amazing. Every single character is wholesome and only wants the best for our star-crossed main couple.
This was supremely fun to watch and I wholly recommend it as something to simply enjoy and just accept that sometimes, just sometimes, it’s nice to have a story where everybody gets a happy ending.
And that’s it. If you want some of my chicken nuggets of wisdom that I gleaned from the movie, read on my child, read on.
Social Media Influences
Kat Valdez (played by JLo) is a superstar. Duh-doi. She has been working her ass off to be as successful as she is but since she is an older singer, the media is not kind to her and her decisions.
Everything she does is scrutinized and criticized. Because she is a woman. In the arts. And also because she is older than what the industry considers standard.
I mean, also because she married a complete stranger she saw in her concert after finding out her fiancé had cheated on her, but that’s besides the point.
We know Kat hates revealing her private life to the world. That is emphasized every time a social media account pops up on the screen to catch her from every unglamorous angle while a slew of comments and reactions from strangers hiding behind usernames bombards the scene.
For someone so glaringly in the public eye, this privacy she seeks is nothing but a fairytale.
Which leads me to:
A Fairytale Masquerading as a Normal Love Story
Kat and Charlie (Owen Wilson) tackle a press conference the day following their supposed marriage to answer some burning questions about their private life to the hungry masses.
For what it’s worth, both Kat and Charlie handle it swimmingly. Kat is composed and joking with the reporters who know her, who have interviewed her a thousand times to the point that they’re basically her close friends. She knows a few by their first names and this rapport, though short, illustrates how much of her life is recorded and tracked with or without her approval (she also has a cameraman named Kofi who records her daily life for vlog-like episodes which is in a similar vein).
Kat explains herself and her actions to this sea of reporters. She doesn’t harp on the idea of “love at first sight” or this being a perfect relationship that comes from out of left field. She’s honest. She says she looked into the crowd and saw Charlie and felt that this was right.
(Which is a fairytale if I ever heard one hunty you can slap a cherry on top and call it a Shirley Temple but it’s still a fairytale.)
And if what she was meticulously planning in her life wasn’t working, then why continue doing it? So why not try something different, like an ice cream flavor in Bristol or a new diner that just opened up in town?
Why not take that leap of faith?
She posed all of this very eloquently and I’m giving you the bastardized version of it. To this degree, the reporters let her off the hook (you can’t not convince me that there wasn’t some iota of camaraderie in that room to accept this nonchalance as an answer to a commitment that is essentially a lifetime).
She sees someone. Feels a connection. Decides to see if this relationship is worthwhile. And so after they get married, they decide to become friends.
Classic.
Insanity
This unspoken theme is mentioned throughout the entire movie and the characters dance in its Dionysian stupor without even knowing it.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
Kat has only ever dated men that social media has approved for her. A music producer. A singer. Scummy men, obviously.
Now she has created agency for herself in a system that denies it to her by choosing and marrying Charlie without the preamble or the vows.
She is tired of doing the exact same thing and getting the exact same results and being hurt. Every. Single. Time. So in Charlie, she finds that freedom (that he whole-heartedly and energetically supports) to be the most authentic version of herself without the cameras (since he is just a math teacher in the city).
Somehow, in this accidental marriage of the right place at the right time, she finds solace in the chaos of her life thanks to Charlie.
Charlie’s insanity is one of selflessness.
No matter how happy he is, or how well he thinks the relationship is going, he will remove himself from the equation if he thinks it will make someone else even marginally happier.
He did that with his first wife. He does that for Kat. He takes his feelings and tucks them deep inside because they can do better than him. Charlie is a math teacher and the coach for the Coolidge Mathletes Pi-thons. That’s all he sees himself as: Just. Charlie.
Charlie only breaks out of his insanity cycle because Kat pulls him out of it. But this time, she asks him to marry her.
And I’m assuming they have a happily ever after because there’s this lovely shot at the end:
This is exactly what the romantic comedy genre is. This feels-good fluff that makes you want to believe in something greater than yourself.
But if you didn’t like it, that’s okay too. Sometimes, people just want to watch the world burn. And that’s okay.
Because there will always be people fighting to help put it out.
Happy Valentine’s Day.