This June, Establishing Shot will feature a miniseries we’re calling Here’s Looking at You, 2002 as we take a look back at films celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. Today, Michaela Owens is starry-eyed for Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock as she dives into their rom-com personas and their sole cinematic collaboration.
For years, I have been preaching about the unending joys of “fluff,” movies that are written off as inconsequential because they feature fizzy romance or sunny musical numbers or just a general breezy atmosphere that has nothing to do with doom-and-gloom superheroism, existential dramas, and creaky “ripped-from-the-headlines” miniseries. Fluff is, to be frank, my lifeblood — nothing makes my eyes light up more than a piece of escapism like an Esther Williams aquamusical, Wayne’s World, Anchorman, the films of Astaire and Rogers, Something’s Gotta Give, or Music and Lyrics. And yet we’re somehow deluded into believing that cozy, crowd-pleasing fare is less legitimate than a three-hour biopic no one asked for that will still somehow win multiple Oscars. The romantic comedy, for instance, is a soufflé of a genre, a delicate balancing act that must present two people falling in love with enough charm and laughs to pierce through the cynicism of the average audience, but still we’ll dismiss its existence because it’s not “serious cinema” — it’s silly movies for (mainly) silly women who are too busy swooning to realize what mindless entertainment they’re consuming.
Which is, of course, ridiculous.
The beauty of the romantic comedy is its emotionality, its simplicity, its effervescence, and, sometimes, its cheese. It is a chance to see life as we wish it was, while also amplifying the magic of the everyday. In a world where everything is on fire and nothing is going right, I crave the inevitability and the earnestness of rom-coms. I need the tonic of two people hesitantly, goofily, exquisitely falling in love, and no one embodies that more delectably than Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock in Two Weeks Notice.
To save a community center in her Brooklyn neighborhood, activist and lawyer Lucy Kelson (Bullock) reluctantly agrees to be the new chief counsel for billionaire real-estate developer George Wade (Grant). Within months, Lucy and George have developed a codependent relationship where he can’t make a decision without her and she can’t stop giving 1,000% to her job. When she receives an emergency text from George and leaves in the middle of her best friend’s wedding only to realize that his SOS is about what outfit to wear, an exhausted Lucy gives her two weeks’ notice. (It’ll haunt me for the rest of my days why the film’s title dropped the apostrophe.) After more obstacles are thrown in their way, including Lucy’s flirtatious, redheaded replacement, the couple finally confront each other’s flaws and recognize that they belong together.
By 2002, Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock were rom-com royalty with star personas as awkward, bumbling romantics who are just striving to be decent people when they meet the love of their lives in films like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Practical Magic, and While You Were Sleeping. With their stammering and flustered demeanors, we’re often supposed to read Grant and Bullock as dorks, which is difficult to do since they look like, well, Grant and Bullock, but there is still something about them that translates into a relatability we can’t resist. Wearing his insecurity like a well-tailored suit, Grant’s quick wit and cheeky irreverence are underlined by his nervous energy. In many of his films, his self-doubt masquerades as confidence, but his feelings of incompetence are always lingering right beneath the surface. In Two Weeks Notice, Grant’s George is a materialistic playboy whose wealth enables a head-in-the-clouds attitude that doesn’t play as well as it used to pre-Occupy Wall Street. However, through his conversations with his older, stuffier brother, the films reveals that for years George has been belittled and disapproved of by his family, who expect him to be little else than the charming face of their company. It isn’t until he is challenged by Lucy that he sees how he should do and be so much more.
Meanwhile, Bullock’s anxiousness is channeled superbly into slapstick, such as when Lucy becomes drunk on George’s boat and brags to him that she is a “twisty bobcat pretzel” when it comes to sex, a hilarious statement undermined by the way she slips down the stairs and inelegantly arches herself over a railing as she chatters away, blissfully unaware of how close she is to going overboard. Lucy’s authenticity is further telegraphed to us by her aggressive snoring, the Tums she keeps in her office for her ulcer, the Zicam she has on her nightstand, and her constant eating (which, in one sequence, causes her to have an, uh, intestinal issue that George solves by carrying her to a stranger’s RV during a traffic jam).
While there is a perception that rom-com leads are just shiny happy people holding hands, Bullock and Grant infuse their characters with a genuineness and humanity that represent the very real imperfections and moral struggles of everyday people. All of the best romantic comedies encompass this, and yet their depth is often questioned. The profundity of wearing your heart on your sleeve shouldn’t be ignored, though, because it taps into what makes us human. The thought of letting love change who you are is terrifying, but it can also uncover the best parts of ourselves, such as Lucy losing some of her rigidity and George finding his integrity.
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The romantic comedy lives and dies by its stars. It isn’t enough to be gorgeous — you have to be a first-rate comic actor and devastatingly romantic and inhabit pathos and have off-the-charts chemistry with your co-star and be entirely committed to a plot that you know isn’t faultless. Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant can do all of this so effortlessly, it takes my breath away. Two Weeks Notice is not only emblematic of their star personas, it is an impeccable illustration of why they are rom-com legends. They have the kind of lightheartedness, humor, physicality, and timelessness you’d find in classic screwball comedies, but there is a modernity to them as well.
The love story of George and Lucy isn’t told through big moments but small ones. They open up about their parents’ expectations over cake on her rooftop, where she wordlessly brushes a crumb off his face and he reflexively twitches his mouth. She imitates his English accent and he adopts an exaggerated French one to say “super.” He tells her, with complete tenderness and even a little bit of awe, that he finds her annoying. In a scene at a restaurant, George remarks that he wants Lucy’s replacement to be “a sort of Katharine Hepburn figure.” “You don’t deserve Katharine Hepburn,” Lucy retorts. “Audrey Hepburn.” “Also too good for you. Just stay away from the Hepburns.” It’s a delicious bit of banter made all the more fun by the business the characters are doing while they talk. George puts some of the ice from his water into Lucy’s; she takes the crunchy onion straws off of his plate and places them on hers; he removes the beets from her salad. It is an adorable thing to behold, in addition to demonstrating the comfort, familiarity, and care that is palpable in their interactions.
Despite their megawatt performances here and in other rom-coms, it seems like Grant and Bullock didn’t really start receiving their flowers until they ventured into more dramatic work, like The Blind Side, Gravity, A Very English Scandal, and The Undoing. “When I stopped being young and handsome and I wasn’t being offered romantic leading men,” Grant said a few years ago, “some really interesting parts came up.” First of all, the idea that Hugh Grant could ever stop being handsome is absurd. But the comment does point out that rom-coms don’t typically feature older leads. (The fact that Bullock was in one this year at the age of 57 — the delightful The Lost City — is a testament to her star power and iconic history with the genre rather than an example of the norm.) It is also a reminder that some actors, including Grant, are so dazzling in a specific genre that they become unable to try others. It’s a frustrating conundrum for them, I’m sure, but there are so few who can do what Grant and Bullock do that watching a film like theirs gives me a twinge of sadness at what we’ve lost. The vibrancy and bewitchment of the romantic comedy has dimmed in the 20 years since Two Weeks Notice, but I will fervently, and perhaps foolishly, hang on to the hope that it will thrive again because there is no other balm like it.
Michaela Owens is thrilled to be the editor of Establishing Shot, in addition to being IU Cinema’s Communications and Outreach Media Specialist. An IU graduate with a BA in Communication and Culture and an MA in Cinema and Media Studies, she never stops thinking about classic Hollywood, thanks to her mother’s introduction to it, and she likes to believe she is an expert on Katharine Hepburn and Esther Williams.