Romance and Revelations

First, the film:

Finding a good romantic comedy is nearly as difficult as finding true love. It can be done, but not without some effort. You’ll likely kiss a lot of frogs like Nicholas Sparks before you find a true prince like Richard Curtis.

Did I say Richard Curtis was a prince? My bad. I meant he’s a king. Romantic comedies don’t get any better than “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” and “Love Actually.” But some get closer than others. The best I’ve seen in recent memory is “Definitely, Maybe.”

“Definitely, Maybe” is smart, funny, modern, mature, and even somewhat sophisticated for a romantic comedy (which I realize is like saying someone looks good for their age, but . . . ).

The film is well written, the directing is good, Ryan Reynolds and Abigail Breslin are just fine, but what really elevates it are the powerhouse performances by its three leading ladies Elizabeth Banks, Isla Fisher, and Rachel Weisz. They’re all amazing, but Weisz is particularly beguiling, and Fisher is absolute perfection. In fact, I find Isla Fisher so irresistibly appealing I actually went to see “Confessions of a Shopaholic.” Hey, I’m not proud of it, but there it is—and she’s worth the embarrassment.

Will Hayes has just received divorce papers from his wife at his advertising office in New York City. He picks up his 11-year-old daughter, Maya at school where she has just been taught sex education. Will can’t take these new sex questions that Maya is asking, so agrees to tell her the story about how he met her mother. Will decides to tell Maya a bedtime story in the form of a puzzle with the names changed so she must figure out which of the three loves of his life became his wife and her mother.

There are so many things to love about this movie—as I’ve said, its leading ladies, chief among them. I love Will’s idealism. I love the film’s use of the time period to tether it to realism. Speaking of realism, I love the maturity and modernity of the adult relationships. And, of course, the relationship between dad and daughter—Will’s Maya, like my Meleah (and all our children) are truly the happy endings of all our relationships.

I love to lose myself in a good romance, but I’m of two minds about them. Sometimes I think they are, as others have suggested, a kind of secular scripture, reminding us of the supremacy and life-altering power of love. Others, I fear, the very notion of the more shallow side of romantic love sets up unrealistic expectations and prevents many of us from ever finding the deep-abiding-God-is-love kind of love that is beyond the heady-hysteria-I-love-you-so-much-it’s-retarded kind of romantic love. When the latter leads us to the former, infatuation can be a path to the divine, but if we spend a lifetime chasing the feelings the first blush of desire produces we might completely miss the far more profound, abiding, selfless love we were each created to give and receive.

“Definitely, Maybe” is a good romantic comedy. Is it great? Can it join the company of “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually?” Definitely. Maybe. Definitely. Maybe.

Now, some font:

There’s not much romance in “Nothing Right,” but there’s plenty of revelation.

I’d never read any of Antonya Nelson’s work until I picked up her latest collection of short stories, “Nothing Right” recently, which means I’d been missing out on one of the most brilliant practitioners of short form fiction of our time. Wow.

Simple.

Elegant.

Insightful.

Astonishing.

Set in the American Southwest, the penetratingly and realistically rendered characters in “Nothing Right” try to keep themselves intact as their personal lives implode. A mother and her teenage son finally find common ground when his girlfriend becomes pregnant. A woman leaves her husband and finds herself living with a stranger who is getting extensive plastic surgery while her best friend is dying of cancer. In “Or Else” a man brings his girlfriend to a house he claims belongs to his family, only to have his lie exposed when one of the real owners comes home to scatter her father’s ashes. My two favorites (yes, you can have two favorites) are “Party of One” about a man and a woman having a fight in a bar; and “Biodegradable” about a woman having an affair with a man who reminds her of someone else—of course, both stories are about far more than what they seem to be “about.”

The flawed, frighteningly familiar characters of Nelson’s eleven stories can do nothing right, but perhaps if we read them, become them, we just might be able to. And, if not, at least we’ll know we’re in good company.