How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days set the stage for the rom-com’s downfall
Image: Graphic: Natalie Peeples
The history of the modern-day romantic comedy goes something like this: Rom-coms were good, then they got really bad, then they went away for a while, and now they’re back with a vengeance. The exact details of that timeline, however, are a bit fuzzier. At the start of the 1990s, Hollywood was regularly producing rom-com classics like Sleepless In Seattle and Four Weddings And A Funeral. By the mid- to late-2000s, it was churning out shit like The Ugly Truth and What Happens In Vegas. So where did the rom-com genre go wrong? The 2008 film 27 Dresses is often cited as the ur-example of a bad aughts rom-com—unfairly, perhaps—but it’s possible the shift actually happened earlier than that. While no one can rightly claim that it caused the artistic downfall of the romantic comedy, in retrospect 2003’s How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days marks an unfortunate turning point for the rom-com genre.
In an oversaturated market, early ’00s romantic comedies relied on high-concept hooks to differentiate themselves. How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days has one of those, but what’s even more striking about the film is that its world has absolutely no texture. Whereas ’90s rom-com creative forces like Nora Ephron and Richard Curtis were great at creating eclectic, lived-in worlds, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days is defined by its generic glossy sheen. Every outfit looks like it was hand-picked by a costume designer, every plot beat like it was written by committee. Director Donald Petrie had previously helmed the romantic comedy Mystic Pizza and the pseudo-rom-com Miss Congeniality, but failed to recapture the sparkle of those films in How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. None of the film’s characters seem to have interior lives, and the supporting characters in particular feel like they freeze in place whenever the leads leave the room and only reanimate when it’s time to serve as their sounding boards. It’s a far cry from the delightful way When Harry Met Sally used Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby.
As with many cinematic trends, it’s hard to give full credit to, or place full blame on, just one film. Bryan Singer’s X-Men may have kicked off the modern era of superhero films, but Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was already in development before X-Men was released. Similarly, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days didn’t necessarily do anything that earlier rom-coms hadn’t already done, or that other contemporary rom-coms weren’t also starting to do. It just happened to coalesce a bunch of uninspired tropes in one place, and find a lot of success while doing so. The film made $105 million domestically, and had a big marketing push that made it especially ubiquitous. Images of Kate Hudson in the Dina Bar-El yellow dress from the film’s climax were everywhere, and the film felt even more pervasive once it became a mainstay on cable TV. (There’s even a How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days board game.) Unfortunately, Hollywood seemed to take the film’s success as proof that it didn’t actually need to put that much artistic effort into romantic comedies in order for them to find an audience.
The film is loosely inspired by Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long’s 1998 illustrated self-help book called How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days: The Universal Don’ts Of Dating. The movie keeps the book’s regressive “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” attitudes about dating, but adds a plot straight out of a Doris Day/Rock Hudson bedroom comedy from the early 1960s. Kate Hudson stars as Andie Anderson, an aspiring political journalist stuck writing shallow how-to columns for the Cosmo-esque magazine Composure. (The column she actually wants to write is called—no joke—“How To Bring Peace to Tajikistan.”) Mining content from the disastrous love life of her friend Michelle (Kathryn Hahn), Andie pitches a column called “How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days.” She’ll hook a potential love interest, and then drive him away by making all the “classic mistakes most women make” in a new relationship, which range from stocking his bathroom with tampons (the horror!) to buying a dog to co-raise with him after they’ve gone on four dates.
It’s a goofy setup that’s at least somewhat justified by the goofy nature of Andie’s job (the movie inspired at least one real-life writer to try the same experiment), but the other half of the plot really strains credibility. Matthew McConaughey plays Benjamin Barry, a rakish advertising exec focused on the manly areas of alcohol and athletic equipment. He has his eyes set on a more lucrative diamond campaign, however, and comes up with an idea to market diamonds directly to women rather than the men in their lives. Ben’s boss is skeptical about the advertising sea change, so he decides to settle it with a bet: If Ben can prove he actually understands women by making one fall in love with him in 10 days (the date of the company’s big gala), he’ll land the diamond account that’s currently being managed by his more competent female coworkers. And since Ben’s workplace rivals already know about Andie’s column, they select her as Ben’s mark to ensure he doesn’t have a chance of winning the bet.
It’s such a bizarre, convoluted setup that it makes you wonder why screenwriters Brian Regan and Burr Steers didn’t just make Ben a rival journalist writing the opposite kind of article. This speaks to the overall laboriousness of the film. There’s humor to be found in watching Andie and Ben try to outmaneuver each other’s mind games while genuinely falling for each other in the process, but at some point it just becomes exhausting to watch Andie actively mistreat Ben in increasingly over-the-top ways. By the time she’s ruining his poker night with deranged baby talk and dragging him to fake couple’s therapy, the premise has been stretched far too thin.