Chapter 33
Platonic Love Stories
There are love stories that do not include traditional love or romance. They are of the heart but not of the body. Otherwise the rules of love stories still apply. You use the same tools to accomplish love blossoming between two people. Actually it doesn’t even have to be people.
It can be between a boy and a horse in The Black Stallion. Jack Nicholson and a dog named Verdell in As Good As It Gets. A little boy and an alien in E.T. Love is love. Vulnerability, empathy, understanding, these things grow when you write them, even with no hormones involved.
Sometimes it’s a relief to have a strong relationship between a man and a woman that evolves into friendship and nothing else.
In Norma Rae (1979, written by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr.), Sally Field’s Norma has her world completely transformed by a man named Reuben (Ron Liebman) who comes to town to start a union in the textile mill where she works. The stakes are high. She is someone who has been discounted by the world. She has been a waitress and now a factory worker. A wife and mother. No one has ever asked anything more of her, until Reuben does. He talks to her as if she is smart and strong and powerful enough to change the world and she begins to believe him and become the person he sees in her. She will never be the same. And neither will her town. They have important work to do and if they stopped to fall in love or kiss or have sex, it would have undermined everything. It’s not about that. Sometimes there are things that are more important. It’s admirable when the writers understand this.
In the novel The Pelican Brief by John Grisham, the two main characters have a romance while embroiled in the thriller plotline. In the movie (1993, written and directed by Alan J. Pakula), they cut the romance and just had Julia Roberts’ Darby Shaw and Denzel Washington’s Gray Grantham fully engaged in the plot to stay alive while tracking down the conspiracy behind the assassination of two Supreme Court Justices. If you hadn’t read the book, you wouldn’t even miss the romance. And since the story takes place in the Deep South, it would have tipped the movie into a story about interracial love, which it isn’t.
My point is when the suspense/stakes/story are intense and fast-paced, partnerships can be forged in the heat of the plotline that are close but not romantic. I like The Peacemaker, a movie in which George Clooney and Nicole Kidman have to track down a portable nuclear bomb in a backpack in Manhattan before it blows up a few million people. They are the leading experts in this field. He’s military and political. She’s science. Until that bomb is handled there is no time for anything else. But once it’s over, we totally get why they fall into each other’s arms. Then is the time for love. Not before. And two or three minutes at the very end of the movie does it. Mission accomplished.
We have a genre now called Bromance which has cropped up in the last decade or so. It is popular, but is just a new nickname for an old genre. They used to be called Buddy Movies.
Gunga Din (1939, screenplay by Joel Sayer and Fred Guiol from a story by Hecht and MacArthur and a poem by Kipling) was about three best friends in the British army in India. Two of them, Cary Grant and Victor McLaglen, try to keep the third, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., from marrying Joan Fontaine. Friends trump women here.
The Front Page (1931, also written by Hecht and MacArthur) is a bromance between a newspaper editor and his best journalist. This later became His Girl Friday. And then The Front Page again in 1974 with Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathau.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It had a girl. She was great. But it wasn’t about her.
Of Mice and Men (1939, screenplay by John Steinbeck and Eugene Solow based on Steinbeck’s book, and again in 1992 with Horton Foote adapting Steinbeck) is a classic, powerfully moving friendship between two men. Heartbreaking.
Midnight Cowboy was as powerful and heartbreaking and the only X-rated film to ever win Best Picture. It wouldn’t be rated X today. Both Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman were nominated for Best Actor Oscars for this film.
Now we have high school bromances like Superbad. And after high school: Harold and Kumar, 21 Jump Street, Wedding Crashers, The Hangover, Dude, Where’s My Car? The list is long. All of them pretty much end the same way. “I love you, man.” There’s even one called I Love You, Man.
And there is no shortage of girlfriend movies from the Ya Ya Sisterhood to the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants up through Sex and the City, Bridesmaids, and Bad Moms.
Mismatched partner cop movies have been a staple since Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop. And it continues on with Hot Pursuit, Hot Fuzz, Heat, well, they need to work a little harder on titles, obviously. This genre comes and goes. And then it comes again.
Friendship love stories also has a sub-genre of the old and the very young. Often a grandparent.
Heidi (many versions from Johanna Spyri’s novel) is no less of a love story than any other, all the versions. The child who melts the hardened heart of a bitter old man.
Good Night, Mr. Tom (1998, Brian Finch adapting Michelle Magorian’s book) is the story of an old man who takes in a little boy who has been sent out of London during the Blitz of World War II. The unlikeliness of this relationship makes it all the more moving. John Thaw plays Mr. Tom.
Grandma (2015, written and directed by Paul Weiss). Lily Tomlin in the title role bonds with her pregnant teenage granddaughter.
Secondhand Lions (2003, written and directed by Tim McCanlies) has two old men, Michael Caine and Robert Duval, bonding with a little boy played by Haley Joel Osment.
The point is whether it’s James Cromwell and a piglet named Babe, or Rhett and Scarlett, love is love and the same four rules apply. The Meet, the Crack, the Obstacle, and Why You? Work with them and it will all work out.