Meg Ryan is 'Addicted to Love' and morbid revenge

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): When you mix Meg Ryan, Matthew Broderick, Alfred Hitchcock, voyeurism, a French accent, a Disney soundtrack and revenge, what do you get? The year's most twisted romantic comedy. No matter that it should open at the same time as the summer's most awaited blockbuster Lost World: Jurassic Park. The appeal is different and self-explanatory.

Or so Warner Bros. hopes. While a plot that has two jilted lovers obsessively spying on their respective exes in the hope to even the score may not be the genre's conventional pitch, Addicted to Love is a nineties fare which takes its cue from First Wives Club's phenomenal success: revenge sells.

Contented with his idyllic, trouble-free life, small-town astronomer Sam (Matthew Broderick) thinks that his long-time relationship with Linda (Kelly Preston) is for keeps. But Linda, as celestial as the stars he gazes at daily, is not just the archetypal angel. She is also Evita at heart. So she flies to the Big Apple and straight into the arms of snotty restaurateur Anton (the very funny Tcheky Karyo) who makes the shocking phrase "I'll rape your skull" sound like a lost art.

Convinced that Linda's attraction is but a passing phase, Sam finds himself in New York and determined to win her back. Before long, he sets up shop in an abandoned warehouse across the alley from his ex and rigs up a spiffy camera obscurant, a telescopic device which projects the paramours' every move onto the wall of his dingy dump. Rear Window, everyone?

No, Vertigo, is more like it. As he faithfully charts the two lovebirds' romantic highs and lows, hoping that he would seize the right momentum to pick up the debris, in walks Maggie (Meg Ryan), Anton's spurned ex-lover. She brings into the whole voyeuristic procedure not only high-tech bugging devices, but also darker motives.

Crushed by the weight of her fiancee's betrayal, Maggie's preoccupation with revenge is so morbid that it becomes a sort of mental necrophilia. Though we know that somewhere beneath the layers of machismo lurks a big reservoir of love, she makes sure Anton's as good as "in pain, hopeless and finished off".

Revenge

In no time, she has the pure-minded Sam also oozing amorous revenge. So the two join forces and concoct all forms of torture imaginable for the poor Frenchman, ranging from moldy strawberries and cockroaches to perfume-filled squirt guns and a lipstick-wearing monkey. Added to that, they blow his bank account too.

At this point, forget the whinging First Wives. Welcome to The Jilted Lovers Club -- the precursor of worst revenge schemes to come. You can't help but feel sorry for Anton, who, incidentally, is the film's true comic gem. Fitting into his narcissistic role like a second skin and sending audiences into peals of laughter, Tcheky Karyo puts That Other Frenchman, Gerard Depardieu, to shame.

And since romantic comedies thrive on predictability, that the two lead characters should eventually fall in love almost warrants no mention.

Meg Ryan was once voted Hollywood's Queen of Romantic Comedies, thanks to career-defining roles in two of the decade's best-loved flicks, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle. Her bankability, it seems, is assured, provided that she sticks to playing bubbly, girlish, effervescent romantic leads with a golden heart.

But stereotypes scare every actor, Ryan no less. As bad girls turn pure and pristine (witness Courtney Love's magnificent transformation after The People vs. Larry Flynt), Tinseltown's cutest blonde decides it's time to play Geena Davies. So she dons a Gothic garb, sports raccoon eye makeup, wears a lot of attitude and crashes her motorcycle into other people's lives. She is crass, temperamental, petulant, schizophrenic, yet there is no glossing over those adorable doe eyes.

Yet putting such a spin on Ryan's usual romantic-comedy image isn't without its calculations. First-time director Griffin Dunne, a native New Yorker well-steeped in the city's neuroses, seems to know exactly where Ryan's quintessential appeal lies: her maddening ability to complicate the simple. So he imbues Maggie with a winning combination of gutter gusto and dormant sensuality. A Sally gone crazy, but Sally nonetheless.

Thus, if in her previous roles Ryan played good gals with a slightly rebellious streak, she now plays a bad gal with a hint of a good heart. Which explains why despite her badness, she too deserves true love in the end. Not to mention all those deja vu moments, such as when Maggie eavesdrops on the lovers' dolby- digitalized, protracted orgasm, and when pals-in-adversary Sam and Maggie accidentally fall into a night of passion, only to wake up the next morning awkward and reticent. Don't we all miss Billy Crystal.

Lack of chemistry

While Dunne's lapse into slapstick moments may fare well with Generation X weaned on Hollywood sitcoms, there are many moments where he could have ended the film. Such as when it is revealed the first time that Anton really does love Linda, or when Sam first confronts Maggie about their feelings. While Hollywood is known to be able to laugh at anything, even murder, stretching a premise so insalubrious as revenge is not without its costs. At one point, when Anton is as good enough as dead, the whole exercise becomes pointlessly stupefying.

Aside from other minor shortcomings such as choppy editing and a disruptively sluggish tempo, whatever trace of reality remains is murdered by Broderick's and Ryan's complete lack of chemistry. But despite the absence of sexual spark, the pairing oddly works, in an off-beat sort of way. Broderick's Sam is almost like a squeamish sheep to Maggie's rip-roaring lion, which is just as well, for something as exasperating as naivete can become appealing in the face of Maggie's macabre worldview.

Andrew Dunn's inventive cinematography also helps, giving the whole proceeding an artsy, yet vaguely subversive edge as the vengeful couple laughs and conspires in front of the live screen.

The final verdict? Childish, but not without its moments.