RATING: 5/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Footnotes
1 Butts are genitals! Change my mind!!!
Literally a Bird’s Diary
We open at some kind of fancy old folks’ convalescence palace. “Simple guy” James Garner shows up to read out loud to senile silver fox Gena Rowlands, but Gena Rowlands’s nurse is like, “She’s really not into it today. Thanks anyway.” Kicking off a trend of men-Red-Rovering-through-women’s-boundaries-like-Ram-Man-but-horny that will come to define the entire film, James Garner is like, “SUCKS 2 SUCK,” and barges in there anyway. He begins reading some of his Ryan Gosling fanfic out of a notebook (that’s a reference), and it goes a little something like this:
It’s June 6, 1940, in Seabrook Island, South Carolina, and Ryan Gosling is at a carnival. Suddenly, he spots a sexy babe on the bumper cars and his nostrils flare so wide you can see his brain.
She’s perfect! She’s so beautiful! She’s said, like, four syllables so far and none of them have been just a faucet of hot drool! She probably has other qualities that are also valuable in a woman and I will get back to you ASAP as soon as I think of any! He has got to have her. (Literally. He literally says, “When I see something that I like, I gotta have it.”) Unfortunately, the lady—Rachel McAdams—turns out to be a human being, kind of, so she’s like, “Get away from me, weirdly aggressive nostril man.”
Goz, like all red-blooded Real American alpha males, is allergic to the Friendzone, so he comes up with a charming scheme to win McAdams over. Approach #47, the Untreated Personality Disorder Gambit: he simply climbs on to the spokes of a moving Ferris wheel and threatens to throw himself into the deadly, grinding machinery unless she agrees to go on a date with him! Cute!!! Instead of fucking screaming in terror at the unhinged stranger coercing her into touching his penis by blaming her for his imminent gory public suicide (THE ULTIMATE NEG) and then waiting for the police to arrive after which Gosling can hopefully get the psychiatric and emotional help he needs, Rachel McAdams is like, “Okeydokey! But I’m getting an appeteaser AND an entree!!!”
Much like Love Actually, this is a movie made for women by a man.
Thanks, men.
For their big first date, Goz knows he needs to turn the romance up a notch, but he kind of shot his wad at the carnival. Finally, though, he gets it. What’s hotter than a suicide? How about a double suicide? (Math: it is literally TWICE AS HOT!)
“Just relax,” he says as he leads McAdams out into the middle of a main thoroughfare. “You need to learn how to trust.” Then he has her lie down next to him in the street, underneath the traffic light. He points up. At the light. That’s the date. Lie in the crosswalk and look at the traffic light.
Now, I don’t mean to get all Microsoft Encarta on you, Goz, but I’m pretty sure the word you’re looking for here isn’t trust, it’s hope. We trust that pedestrians and cars will obey the traffic laws designed to keep everyone safe, such as “don’t drive on the sidewalk” and “don’t fucking take a nap in the middle of the fucking street because that’s where the fucking cars go.” And we hope that creepy jackasses don’t do reckless shit to impress their girlfriends, such as placing their vulnerable skulls in the paths of oncoming Chryslers whose drivers are just trying to get home from the factory without squishing any teenage brains. Also, you know you can see the traffic lights from the sidewalk, right? It is arguably a better angle. COULD YOU PLEASE GO OVER THE COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF THIS ACTIVITY ONE MORE TIME.
But apparently Gosling’s ’stincts are right on because McAdams is so exhilarated by almost getting run over that she presses her boday against his in a sensual dance.
“BLAH BLAH BLAH,” James Garner cuts in, “BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH.”
Oh, cool, this part’s back. Old Guy Reads Out Loud: The Movie.
“It was an improbable romance,” James Garner Garn-splains. Yes. How can a beautiful white woman ever be with a beautiful white man!?!??!?! (Speaking of white people, BTW, this movie would be a lot less sympathetic if they made the characters as racist as those people would have been IRL. Kudos on totally whitewashing this region and time period while scoring it mostly with music by Black artists! Do you know how hard it is to give a shit about Ryan Gosling’s teenage crush while listening to Billie Holiday?)
Next, this actual dialogue happens:
McAdams: You think in another life I coulda been a bird?
Goz: What do you mean?
McAdams: CAW CAW SAY I’M A BIRD!!! SAY IT!
Goz: You’re a bird.
McAdams: Now say you’re a bird too.
Goz: If you’re a bird, I’m a bird.
Is this screenplay literally a bird’s diary?
McAdams makes Goz go to a rich-people dinner so she can introduce him to her dad’s mustache. Some fancy-lad asks Goz how much money he makes at the dirty skritchy poor-hole where he works, and Goz, in that horrible poor way he has, is like, “Forty cents an hour!” (Then McAdams’s mom is like POOOOOOOOOR RAAAAAAAAAAGE!!! and nickels shoot out of her ears on jets of steam.)
After dinner, Goz takes McAdams to a haunted house in the woods and goes, “It’s time.” Now I’m going to fuck you on a ghost. But before they get down to it, McAdams insists on talking about shutters for an hour because women love interior design, until he promises to build her a mansion LITERALLY COVERED IN SHUTTERS so she’ll shut up. Then she’s like, “OKAY, DO ME ON THIS DERELICT MOUSE PIANO!”
(Question: In olden times, how did they even know how to do it? Like, before sex ed, when everything was supposed to be a secret? It’s not like now, when a man Gosling’s age would have watched literally ten thousand hours of instructional video by this point [porno]. Vintage intercourse must have been THE DRYEST WORST.)
McAdams takes her shirt off and Gosling’s like, “I knew you had boobs. I knew all along.”
Then Gosling takes his pants off and is like, “And yes. I have one. One penis.”
Then McAdams takes off her underpants and is like, “Well, are you ready for this? My lower part?”
But then, right at penetration o’clock, Kevin Connolly busts in all, “YOU GOTTA PUT IT AWAY, MAN! HER PARENTS CALLED THE SEX COPS!!!”
So they all get hauled back to the McAdams plantation for a lecture about why rich penises are better than poor penises, and Mom gets major harsh: “He’s a nice boy, but he is TRASH TRASH TRASH NOT FOR YOU” (that is a real sentence, not a sentence I made up for a joke). Goz runs outside all wounded-masculine and tells McAdams that they can’t be together because he knows he’ll NEVER BE ABLE TO BUY HER THE SHUTTERS SHE DESERVES, so McAdams gets all defensive and Harry and the Hendersonses him and he runs away to cry in his swamp until death. Romance is abolished.
McAdams moves to New York to go to Sarah Lawrence, and Gosling moves to Atlanta to go to army. He writes her one letter every day for a year (“That’s 365 letters”—thanks, movie), but little does he know, Mother McAdams is squirreling all of his letters away in her secret hex box lined with poor-people skin! Apparently, McAdams is incapable of looking up Gosling’s address and sending him a letter, which would be a fucking irritating plot hole except I’m not sure if you can make a hole in a perpetual sucking void.