CONFESS IT, YOU FREAKS!

DIRECTED BY GRIFFIN DUNNE

STARRING: UMA THURMAN, JEFFREY DEAN MORGAN, COLIN FIRTH, SAM SHEPARD, SARITA CHOUDHURY, AJAY NAIDU, KEIR DULLEA and ISABELLA ROSSELLINI

‘The Accidental Husband’ is yet another affirmative on my standpoint of the romantic comedy, an exhibit of incredible conception that’s done incorrigibly wrong. Not overdone, not underdone – just wrong. We’ve had only so much as anti-clichés in this regard, from the much-deliberated Vince Vaughn-Jennifer Aniston starrer ‘the Break-up’ to the more from-the-heart Marc Webb motion picture ‘(500) Days of Summer’. Cinema intellects have long usurped on the anti-thesis, but that’s not what I’m asking – I’m just utterly flummoxed at how no romantic comedy sketch has had its fair share of justice done to it.

Look at it this way – even something titled ‘the Ugly Truth’ was not as ugly as the truth is supposed to be. And we’re actually talking about a truth that’s uglier than just ‘ugly’.

Where was this film going? The beginning was obvious, so the characters had to be drawn to suit the needs of an end that the makers think the audience requires. Which in turn means that we’re watching/listening to a ‘Real Love’ that the film so inevitably condemns with a dilemma that’s so diabolic that it’s not a dilemma at all. It’s incisive, it’s a tool that’s meant to claw the viewer and coerce them to believe in something that even the film doesn’t stand for – in other words, it’s a box-office superlative.

I’m really sick of watching the American re-imagination, which in turn is a self-imagination of an unchangeable self, forgive me for being redundant. What disappointed me more than anything, more than its wavering foundation in the relationship-advice show, more than the juvenile attempt to cater to the American-Indian audience, more than the relentless ‘other man’ than the softening hero was the fact that the film was actually made. ‘The Runaway Bride’ was actually a film in itself, and I wonder how many more times we’re to watch a re-run, especially where the woman isn’t half as exciting as the well-represented Julia Roberts. And it’s not Bill that we want to kill this time.

I watch my version of the film, I see a disappointment, a lesson learnt at one’s own expense. I see Emma Lloyd (Uma Thurman) and her accidental husband Patrick Sullivan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) in wedlock, where my Patrick would still resort to giving her hell because that’s what he’s supposed to do, because there’d be a Sophia in his picture that would keep driving him berserk irrespective of how ‘sweet’ or ‘coaxing’ Dr. Lloyd turns out to be. I’d imagine a wedding cancelled citing an already existent marriage, and I’d imagine an annulment, a point proven and the slam of a door. Sophia’s not going to come back and neither is Dr. Lloyd. And in the meantime, I’d imagine Richard Braxton (Colin Firth) as having spunk enough to enterprise himself with another woman, or maybe get himself married to profession as they call it. In the end, it’d just be Dr. Lloyd exercising her ‘ten years of scientific research’ as she’s doomed to her show and nothing more.

But then, that’s ‘the Girlfriend Experience’ for you. So you might as well go ahead and watch that film instead, than search in vain for the silver lining in this corroded plate.