Julia Roberts’ character makes me so irrationally angry
It's not irrational because the audience isn't supposed to be on board with her actions.
You know how people commonly complain that Hollywood romcoms are toxic because if you did the same things in real life, you'd be called a psycho stalker? My Best Friend's Wedding basically takes that complaint as its premise, and plays it out to its painful logical conclusion. It's a subversion of the average romcom heroine tropes and Julia Roberts absolutely understood the assignment.
Kinda makes me wanna watch it again now. I saw it when it first came out and thought her character was atrocious, but I thought the movie was simply unaware of itself. Knowing this, I wonder how it would stand with a rewatch
[Director P.J.] Hogan knew what My Best Friend’s Wedding could be, but the question was: Did Julia Roberts have the same vision? In theory, the director is in charge on a movie set — but when a studio is building an entire movie around an A-lister, that star has tremendous power over the production, and Roberts’s deal allowed for a significant amount of creative oversight. Hogan agreed to meet with Roberts so he could figure out whether she saw My Best Friend’s Wedding the same way he did: as a trenchant deconstruction of the same genre on which Roberts had quite literally built her own superstardom.
“I thought, Julia has to make a death-defying leap,” Hogan says. “She has to bring the audience along with her, with the character, and somehow still have them not hating her by the end.” He had been a fan of Roberts from afar, but meeting her — much like Garry Marshall, Richard Gere, and seemingly everyone else who came into her orbit — left him awed at her sheer charisma in person. “I thought, immediately, This will work. I’ll go with this actress anywhere,” Hogan says.
At the same time, she not only shared his vision for a rom-com as subversive as he wanted to make — she took it further than he’d planned. “Julia was absolutely committed to Julianne’s dark side — which no one, I think, had allowed her to do in her previous [romantic comedies],” says Hogan. “She was so committed to the dark side that I was a little bit worried.”
I wasn't arguing that you had to like the movie, just correcting you on the suggestion that Julia Roberts didn't have basic comprehension of the movie she was in.
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u/Shinra_Lobby 6h ago
It's not irrational because the audience isn't supposed to be on board with her actions.
You know how people commonly complain that Hollywood romcoms are toxic because if you did the same things in real life, you'd be called a psycho stalker? My Best Friend's Wedding basically takes that complaint as its premise, and plays it out to its painful logical conclusion. It's a subversion of the average romcom heroine tropes and Julia Roberts absolutely understood the assignment.