Nobody really wants it to be 2021, do they? A vicious global pandemic is about to enter its third year, the world is on fire and populist politics threatens to overturn democracy as we know it. Some people have reacted to these terrible times by trying to change things. Others are willing themselves back to a more innocent era.
By “others”, I mean Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, who are doing their level best to make it 2005 again. How? By making a romcom, that’s how. If this was a decade and a half ago, then Marry Me would automatically be one of the biggest hits of the year, bringing together the unstoppable forces responsible for Maid in Manhattan and Wedding Crashers. But it isn’t 2005, it’s 2021, and the thought of watching Lopez and Wilson shuffle through a romcom together is baffling. Perhaps it’d help to go through the Marry Me trailer beat by beat.
Meet Jennifer Lopez. In Marry Me she plays Jennifer Lopez; a hot, sexy pop star with millions upon millions of fans. She dances. She sings. She poses in self-consciously awkward ways in front of various logos, because she is not above gratuitous product placement. Her life is perfect.
But Lopez’s biggest stunt is yet to come. Any day now she will release a single called Marry Me, performed with her fiance, and it will be launched at a globally livestreamed concert during which – you guessed it – she will marry him. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
Now, meet Owen Wilson. In Marry Me, he plays a recently divorced maths teacher whose best friend is Sarah Silverman. I know what you’re thinking. This is going to be a film about Jennifer Lopez marrying her boyfriend and Owen Wilson falling in love with Sarah Silverman and all of them being very happy and never meeting. Of course you think that. That would be a good film.
But this is Marry Me, so on the eve of her performance, Jennifer Lopez discovers that her fiance has been cheating. Again, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that Jennifer Lopez is going to cancel the release of her single, call off the concert and work through her emotions in a healthy, private way until she feels better equipped to face the world again. Of course you think that. That’s what you would do.
But this is Marry Me, so Jennifer Lopez walks out on stage in a wedding dress, arbitrarily points at a nondescript 50-year-old man in the crowd and asks him to be her husband. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that Owen Wilson was divorced too recently to throw himself into another relationship, not least one that involves immediately marrying one of the world’s most famous women in the full glare of public scrutiny. Of course you think that. Only a psychopath would do that.
But this is Marry Me. Instead, they full-on Married at First Sight each other and their lives are immediately ruined. Because this is a terrible idea, right? This is the stuff of psychological horror, right?
No. This is the movies. What happens is that – brace yourself – their marriage actually works. Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson might have wildly different lives, but they are equally open to change and use their newfound situation to learn from one another. From Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson learns how to participate in press conferences that only exist to justify his wife’s decision to promote a middling new song by potentially destroying the life of a complete stranger.
And in return, Owen Wilson teaches Jennifer Lopez to enjoy some of the world’s more humble delights, such as riding on a big wheel at a theme park that his wife has exclusively booked out for the night. See? It’s sweet.
And this is a romcom, so you know how the rest of it goes. Their union is challenged in some way, but they work together to overcome it. And after six weeks, they have sex. And then Jennifer Lopez moos like a cow into a microphone. The end. Textbook romcom stuff, really.
