Film review: ‘Isn’t It Romantic’

Rebel Wilson’s gift for physical comedy is on display in ‘Isn’t It Romantic.’|

“Isn’t It Romantic” opens with a girl watching “Pretty Woman” on television and, too young to be put off by the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold trope, she is enraptured - and sure to grow up with unreasonable expectations of romance. Luckily her mother - Jennifer Saunders of “Absolutely Fabulous” fame - is there to dissuade her. She tells her daughter the best-case scenario is that someone marries her for a visa.

Flash forward 20 years and that girl is Natalie (Rebel Wilson), an unmarried architect no longer swayed by the easy breezes of romantic comedies. When she is asked out to karaoke by her supportive friend Josh (Adam DeVine) she blows him off and when her rom-com obsessed colleague Whitney (Betty Gilpin) - “Sweet Home Alabama is a masterpiece!” - streams movies at work, Natalie tells her to quit it.

Taking the subway home one night, Natalie is knocked out while trying to evade a mugger. When she awakens, she’s styled like early-’90s Julia Roberts in a New York City that smells of cupcakes and flowers rather than garbage. In addition to the hydrangeas and buttercream everywhere, she has two consecutive encounters with kind men and her immediate response is, “Did I die?” She arrives at work and finds she’s a starchitect rather than a thwarted designer of parking garages. At that point, she realizes she must be trapped in a more romantic alternate dimension.

Into this “Matrix for lonely women” strides Blake (Liam Hemsworth and his lovely head of hair), laughing in an irresistible Australian manner and dispensing feel good quotes like, “You know, the Buddhists say…” Natalie believes he’s the man she should end up with according to the inflexible laws of romantic comedy, so she tries to relax and let him woo.

Strangely, her pal Josh looks just the same in rom-com land as he did in the real world, though he’s thrust into a relationship with Isabella (Priyanka Chopra) who calls herself a yoga ambassador but is more well known as the swimwear model adorning billboards across the city.

Elsewhere in the rom-com version of the world, Whitney transforms into a “Devil Wears Prada” kind of rival and Donny (Brandon Scott Jones), who was previously Natalie’s furtive neighbor, becomes the gayest of gay best friends in the fantasia (he makes Rupert Everett’s campiness look restrained in comparison).

Though it’s jammed with references to other films in the beloved genre, “Isn’t It Romantic” smartly hews closest to the plot machinations of “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (because it’s the best rom-com of the past 25 years). The film is obligated to include a karaoke scene and happily the song selected is a strong one: “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” accompanied by appropriately collaborative dance choreography.

Wilson’s gift for physical comedy is on display - her full face plant while hopping a subway turnstile stands out - and she also sharply delivers pithy lines like, “This lobster is the size of a cat!”

Screenwriters Dana Fox, Erin Cardillo and Katherine Silberman created a fresh and unusual script. On the one hand, they take every opportunity to update canonical lines - after Blake suggests a unique air trip Natalie replies, “You had me at hello-copter” - but they also do the more necessary work of addressing the internalized self-hatred that’s common even for those happily-ever-after rom-com heroines.

While the script does most of the work, director Todd Strauss-Schulson is forever in our hearts because he has released a movie in 2019 that clocks in at under 90 minutes.

The ending of “Isn’t It Romantic” is worth remembering for Rebel Wilson’s straightforward but powerful sentence about herself: “I’m smart and kind and funny.” That’s a more important and profound sentiment than you’ll find in any recent picture.

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