Rom-coms for the older set? Yes, please - but let’s remember that 50 isn’t 30

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The rom-com is getting old. I don’t mean the concept of romantic comedy; that’s having a renaissance (of sorts). I mean the age of the actors in them, who are now mature enough to suffer aching backs alongside their aching hearts.

Let’s look at some numbers: Julia Roberts was 23 when Richard Gere clapped that necklace box on her gloved hand in Pretty Woman; and 32 in Notting Hill and Runaway Bride. (All in the 1990s, a golden age of rom-coms.)

Meg Ryan was 28 When Harry Met Sally, and 32 when she peeled that apple in Sleepless in Seattle. Reese Witherspoon was 25 when she bent and snapped in Legally Blond. Jennifer Lopez was 32 in The Wedding Planner. Rachael Leigh Cook was 20 in She’s All That.

Now let’s look at present-day rom-coms. At 43, Rachel Leigh Cook is back in A Tourist’s Guide to Love (Netflix), playing a lovelorn travel agent who falls for a hunky guide in Vietnam. Chris Evans, 41, stars opposite Ana de Armas in the action/romance Ghosted (AppleTV+) – he’s a farmer, she’s a CIA agent! Priyanka Chopra, 40, as a children’s book illustrator, and Sam Heughan, 42, as a music journalist, find Love Again – with the help of Celine Dion, playing herself, making her film debut at 55 (in theatres May 5).

In the past few months, we’ve also seen Witherspoon, 47, and Ashton Kutcher, 45, ponder Your Place or Mine; and Jonah Hill, 39, and Lauren London, 38, in You People – a relationship so millennial their parents are the reason they break up and get back together. Salma Hayek, 56, and Channing Tatum, 42, grind out some feelings in Magic Mike’s Last Dance; and Jennifer Lopez, 53, and Josh Duhamel, 50, fret over canapes and marauding pirates in Shotgun Wedding. (The weirdest rom-com scene ever has to be the one where Duhamel chooses to wrap lights around a pineapple rather than wrapping himself around Lopez, even though she’s waving her bum like a semaphore guiding him to bed.)

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely believe people in their 40s and 50s should and do fall in love. But so many of the films I’ve mentioned have a weird, disconnected feeling to them, because contrary to what the injectables industry wants us to believe, 50 is not the same as 30. Watching a grown-up actor pretending to have the same concerns as someone a generation younger is like riding a bicycle that someone sold you as new, covered with flowers and streamers and pompoms so you don’t notice that the frame is rusty and the tires are worn. Or like watching Big, except if 50-year-old Tom Hanks was pretending to be 30-year-old Tom Hanks.

Take Shotgun Wedding. Duhamel and Lopez are getting married in their 50s. That should be a plot point in the film, or why are they in it? Why are these two people, clearly adults, marrying now? What have they given up and what have they gained to get to this point? Instead, we just get the same stock hijinks that we’d get if the characters were in their 30s.

But being as hot as a 30-year-old does not mean that you behave or think or feel like one. (Even if someone casts Jennifer Coolidge, 61, to play the mother of Duhamel, 11 years her junior; or hires Tate Donovan and Amy Sedaris, 59 and 62, to play the parents of Evans, in his early 40s.) When you pretend it doesn’t matter that you’re 50, your character and your film lose all specificity. And specificity is what a great rom-com is about.

We fall for a rom-com when it woos us into believing that this specific charming streetwalker, lifestyle magazine writer or liberal historic-preservation lawyer is destined for that specific corporate raider, sleepless widower or cheeky English real estate magnate. (Respectively, Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, Two Weeks Notice.) Jerry Maguire has Dorothy Boyd at hello because she can see him, the man he almost is – not simply because it’s the third act and it’s time for them to kiss.

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Look, I get that it’s hard to write sparkling dialogue for two 48-year-olds sitting in a restaurant warily sussing out how much they should say about their divorces. I get that it’s much easier to dress them in floppy woolen beanies and send them out to dribble a basketball on a moonlit court. But if you do that, you’re missing some interesting stuff to be mined about taking risks in midlife. When a 43-year-old woman ends a five-year relationship, as Cook does in her new film, I guarantee it’s a lot more, “Did I waste my chance at motherhood?” than “I guess he wasn’t The One.”

Nostalgia might be one reason for this arrested development. I imagine some of these films were greenlit by executives and producers who came of age in the nineties, and just want to see Reese, Sandra and Julia’s eyes go all wet and velvety again. I mean, there’s literally a moment in A Tourist’s Guide to Love where Cook – forever frozen in our minds as the nerd who transforms into a swan to the strains of Kiss Me – tells her tour guide that there’s something she needs to say to him. “Is it kiss me?” he asks. That’s not an Easter egg, it’s a whole Easter dinner, plus leftovers.

I also wonder if there’s a dearth of twenty- and thirtysomethings writing rom-coms for people their age. Do they have a different idea altogether about romance? Can you moon over one theoretical soulmate when your phone identifies 500 potential soulmates in your designated 20-kilometre radius?

Are the people who were preteens in the 1990s – who were pre-social-media, and spent their weekends rewinding and rewatching the stacks of rom-coms they rented at Blockbuster – the last to have internalized the marriage plot? Will they therefore cling to its familiar structures forever, and keep its stars in a state of thirtysomething stasis? Can the rom-com grow up?

Maybe we’ll get an answer in May, when Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s sci-fi rom-com, with its vast cast of fortysomethings-plus (Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston) premieres at the Cannes Film Festival. Or in June, on Netflix, when Gabrielle Union, 50, romances a younger man in The Perfect Find. Perhaps on July 1, when The Idea of You drops on Prime. Anne Hathaway, 40, plays a woman who takes her 15-year-old daughter to Coachella and falls for a pop star. It’s inspired by Harry Styles fan fiction, a genre not known for its emotional complexity. But hey, a rom-com can’t exist without hope.

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