by Lindy West
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.
At this point, James Garner pipes up to say, “If summer romances have one thing in common, it’s that they’re shooting stars!” Let me stop you there. Because they have at least two things in common right up front, which are 1) they’re romances…2) that happen in the summer. Who are you, Forrest Gump’s mom?
Meanwhile, in World War II, Kevin Connolly dies. Like, four seconds after he gets there. It is not a good part of the movie, as parts of movies go.
McAdams goes to work at a hospital for wounded soldiers. “To her,” Garner intones, “the broken men with shattered bodies who filled the ward were all [Goz], or someone who fought beside him in the jungle or the frozen snow-swept road.” YOU GUYS. FOR FUCK’S SAKE. SHE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HE’S IN THE ARMY. SHE HASN’T GOTTEN ANY OF HIS 365 BORING LETTERS, REMEMBER? THIS NOT-GETTING-THE-LETTERS MIX-’EM-UP IS, LIKE, THE DETAIL THAT YOUR WHOLE MOVIE HINGES ON.
One of her patients, James Marsden, starts hitting on her at work even though he’s heavily medicated, they’ve never had a real conversation, and she’s just trying to do her fucking job without some dude in a full-body cast constantly pointing at his papier-mâché boner. After he recovers, he tracks her down at her school and is like, “Look! I got my cast off! [WINK] Let’s date!” And so they do. And then he proposes. So she says yes. Because why not.
Yo, does this really have to be McAdams’s life? Just endlessly stalked and followed and watched and obsessed over by every man she ever meets? And then she has to say, “Thank you,” and call it “love”?
This sucks!
Gosling comes home from the war and—being the king of healthy impulses—decides to buy that pile of rotten boards where he almost put it in McAdams all those years earlier and fix it up. PRETTY sure that guy’s a teardown, but okay, buddy.
Goz spends all of his time obsessively working on the house. One time he sees McAdams out of the bus window and chases her down the street, only to discover her making out with Marsden in a cafe. So instead of talking to her or being normal, he just breathes heavily behind a bush and then goes home and has cry-sex with a war widow whom he’s TOO BROKEN TO LOVE. (Note to my partner: if I ever get dementia, and you show up to read to me from your diary every fucking day, feel free to leave out the part where you bang the war widow.)
One day, McAdams is trying on literally the world’s ugliest harlequin jester vampire wedding sack when she spots a photo of Gosling and his stupid house in the newspaper.
She rushes into Marsden’s office and is like, “Listen. Bro. I have to go on a trip that definitely has 100 percent absolutely zero to do with Ryan Gosling’s magnificent penis. Also, I never paint anymore, which apparently is a beloved hobby of mine that has barely been mentioned once in this entire film but is now a major emotional sticking point. The fact that I’ve quit painting is somehow your Ryan Gosling’s penis. I MEAN FAULT.”
She goes to Ryan Gosling’s house and immediately drives her car through his fence like a classic woman.
Then we have to spend twenty minutes watching footage from James Garner’s actual doctor’s appointment. The doctor asks James Garner why he spends so much time reading out loud to Gena Rowlands. “Science only takes you so far,” Garner says. “And then comes God.” I wonder if there are audience members, at this point in the movie, who are still wondering how the Garner/Rowlands story line relates to the Gosling/McAdams story line. If so, I think those people should have to go live on an island and weave their own shoes. Like, I find it hard to believe that Gena Rowlands the character didn’t see where this was going by minute three.
Gosling and McAdams have dinner and then he asks her to come back in the morning. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”
IT’S MY PENIS. It’s always been my penis.
Meanwhile, James Garner’s kids show up at the old folks’ home and are like, “Daaaaaad, stop reading your notebook to this old lady over and over. She doesn’t even like you.” But Garner refuses: “That’s my sweetheart in there. This is my home now. Your mother is my home.” I live in your mom. I’ll never forget the first time I “lived” in your mom. Here’s a fucking four-hour movie about it.
In the morning, Marsden calls McAdams’s hotel room and she’s like, OH GAH GOO GOO GAR GAR NO NOTHING’S WRONG I’M NOT BEING WEIRD YOU’RE THE ONE BEING WEIRD, and then goes back to Gosling’s house for her “surprise.” He rows her out into this goose-infested swamp (the part this movie leaves out is that geese are rank, shit-covered, hissing demons, but I guess it’s okay because they are his kin), even though he knows it’s about to start pouring down rain and says so before they get in the boat.
When it starts raining, both of them are like, “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
OH MY GOD, THE RAIN TOLD THE FUNNIEST JOKE.
And then she’s like, why didn’t you write me, and he’s like, I wrote you 365 letters, and she’s like, oh okay I forgive you, and they lick each other’s faces, and geese are watching, which is weird because one of those is his mom, and then it’s time for penis-in-vagina (for best results, as you watch the sex scene, remember that James Garner is describing it all to an old lady with dementia). In the morning, McAdams wakes up to a special gift from Gosling. He got her some painting stuff!!! Because he’s not like James Marsden, who made PAINTING ILLEGAL.
Mom shows up and warns them that Marsden is coming, and then drives McAdams over to the quarry and is like, “See that dirty laborer? I used to love him, but I abandoned him because I’m a classist shithead who loved shutters. JUST LIKE YOU. So now I just come here sometimes and stare at him and masturbate in my car. Just kidding, I am repressed.” Then she finally hands over all the letters she intercepted from Gosling, and literally says—as far as I can discern—“I’ve been keeping these inside my ball bag for seven years.”
I’ve been keeping these inside my ball bag for seven years. I’VE BEEN KEEPING THESE INSIDE MY BALL BAG FOR SEVEN YEARS.
I was confused at first, but later I googled it and found out that “ball bag” was 1940s Southern slang for nutsack.
Then Gosling and McAdams get in one last fight because this movie needed to be longer, and he tells her that she’s “a pain in the ass 99 percent of the time.” That means that he loves her approximately three and a half days per year. The rest of the time she makes him feel like a spear or dagger is literally stabbing him in his asshole.
So McAdams is like, “I have to go.” (Whispering: “Number two.”)
Feeling conflicted, she goes to hang out with Marsden, hoping that it’ll help her make up her mind. Marsden tells her, “In spite of everything, I love you,” which is almost as hot a pickup line as “You are a pain in the ass 99 percent of the time.” HOW WILL SHE CHOOSE BETWEEN THESE CASANOVAS? WAS THIS DIALOGUE WRITTEN BY MYSTERY?
Uuuuuuuugh, anyway, she chooses Gosling, OF COURSE, and then they animorph into James Garner and Gena Rowlands, and then James Garner’s magic notebook cures Gena Rowlands’s dementia for five minutes—you know, like medical science—but every time the skeptical doctor comes in, she goes back to being senile again because she’s the Michigan J. Frog of dementia, and then we find out that the title of the notebook is The Story of Our Lives (HEY, WHY NOT JUST CALL IT BOOK), and it turns out the notebook was Tom Riddle’s diary all along, and then Gena Rowlands is like, “Do you think we could just die together real quick?” and he’s like, “Yeah, prolly,” so then they do. Cause of death: felt like it. Cause of death: hospital food, amirite? Cause of death: basilisk.
And that’s how Ryan Gosling got laid one time.
RATING: 3/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Harry Plot Hole
I would call myself a so-so Harry Potter freak. I couldn’t recite the names of everyone on the Slytherin Quidditch team from a random Slytherin vs. Ravenclaw match on page 217 in book three (trust me, SOME KIDS CAN), but I can tell you the wizard who thought the world was ready for a cheese cauldron (Humphrey Belcher), the general gist of Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration (you can’t turn poop into food), and the best kiss Ron ever had (Auntie Muriel). In other words, I could not beat your niece at a Harry Potter trivia pub quiz, but I could maybe beat you. Relative to other Harry Potter people, I’m in it medium.
As it is for, I assume, plenty of other adults with emotional problems, Harry Potter is a reliable security blanket for me—during challenging periods in my life, listening to the (Jim Dale) audiobooks has been the only thing that gets me to sleep. It’s low-stakes and goofy, but also high-stakes and I care about the characters, plus there’s magic. Those are all of my needs. However, the best thing about Harry Potter, the thing that keeps me hooked year after year, is that the internal logic barely hangs together. None of it makes any sense! The best thing about Harry Potter is that I hate it!!!
My best friend and I have a decade-long text thread where we send each other new Harry Potter plot holes we discover (or forget and then remember again) and then become magnificent with rage over each one. And we discover new ones literally every day! If you could run a light bulb on Harry Potter plot holes, we could solve the climate crisis because Harry Potter plot holes are AN INEXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCE.
For starters, because it’s at the start of this movie, can we talk about the Deluminator? Both the book and movie versions of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone open with Dumbledore clicking his “put-outer” and sucking up all the streetlights on Privet Drive so Hagrid can land his flying motorcycle. First of all, how useful is this? How often do you specifically need to put out ten to twelve Muggle streetlights? Often enough that you needed to make a dedicated invention for it? A magic wand isn’t enough? And who fabricated the Deluminator? House elf slave labor? Or was Dumbledore up in his office—right in the middle of Voldemort’s rise to power—hunched over a soldering iron(?) fashioning a tiny hinge for his magic cigarette lighter that sucks up Muggle light-balls? Mightn’t his time have been better spent making, I don’t know, A GUN? Also, if Dumbledore forgets to put the light-balls back in the lamps, how do the Muggles get the lights back on? Does it work to just change the bulbs? Is he stealing the electricity? Or the concept of light itself?
(Then, in book seven, suddenly the Deluminator is also…a radio? That tells you when your friends are talking shit about you and kind of leads you to them anywhere in England? So, it sucks up balls of light and also helps you find your friends’ tent. HOW IS THAT AN INVENTION???? That’s like if I went on Shark Tank with a shoe that was also a dialysis machine, but I didn’t tell Mark Cuban about the dialysis thing until we’d already been in the shoe business for like twenty years. Why????????? People’s kidneys are failing, man!!!!!)
Anyway, Dumbledore walks past a cat sitting on the curb, just a regular cat like you might see in a neighborhood. WRONG! IT’S AN OLD HUMAN WOMAN.
Why is it that at no point in this entire book and/or film series does Professor McGonagall
use her turn-into-a-cat power for anything helpful? She never uses it to sneak into the Ministry of Magic and eavesdrop, she never uses it to see Voldemort naked, she never uses it to give Lucius Malfoy cat scratch fever of the dick. They say it’s excruciatingly difficult to become an animagus and takes years and years of study (except that even flushable wipe Peter Pettigrew figured it out in, like, one year as a teenager, but okay1), yet McGonagall uses it literally exclusively to blow kids’ minds on the first day of Transfiguration class. Ma’am, you are engaged in guerilla warfare against a shadow army of fascists that can do magic. Turn into a cat one time?
It’s cute that they try to make pointy wizard hats a workable fashion choice in this first movie and then by number two they’re like, “Yeah, this is fucking stupid, no one would wear this, it’s so tall, I can’t get through a door.” The pointy hats are the most implausible thing in the whole series, and that includes someone whose last name is Lupin coincidentally getting bit by a werewolf.
Dumbledore and McGonagall arrive at the Dursleys’ house where they’re about to dump Harry, an infant, for eleven years. McGonagall is like, “Where’s the baby?” and Dumbledore is like, “Hagrid is bringing him,” and she’s like, “Uh, excuse me?” and he’s like, “I would trust Hagrid with my life.” R U sure? He is the most bumbling person you’ve ever met!
They leave the baby on the porch in the dark and go back…home? Where do Hogwarts teachers live? Do they have to, like, live in their offices? Are they allowed to get married and have children? Let the teachers live in Hogsmeade, at least! That way the students wouldn’t constantly have to see McGonagall in her tartan dressing gown, and the teachers could achieve some work-life balance. Can someone please start unionizing at Hogwarts? I nominate Madam Hooch—she’s not busy (how is “occasional referee” a full-time job??????).