Writing by Rom-Com: Matters of Life and Dating

Along with compiling Netflix lists of the best streaming romances with Jen Heart, I’m starting to write longer reviews of movies on this site. With a lot of screenwriting tips and tricks increasingly being used by novelists, watching rom-coms is a great way to learn about telling a romantic story in any form.

But really, who needs an excuse to watch some awkward fumbling, snappy dialogue, and grand gestures? For this I’ll be focusing mostly on films languishing in my Netflix Instant queue, with the occasional newer release.

First up: Matters of Life and Dating, a 2007 Lifetime film starring Ricki Lake as a single woman trying to negotiate being a breast cancer survivor and her love life. The story is based on the life of Linda Dackman, the cancer survivor and author of the memoir Up Front who helped pen the script. Many shows featuring cancer patients and survivors feature older, often married characters or teens with the illness. I was drawn to the unique premise of a thirty-something woman facing cancer and a mastectomy and the effect it had on her dating life: her sexuality, her feelings of attractiveness, her fears of being alone.

What lessons did the film teach me about writing romance? Here are three:

Lesson One: Watch How You Punish Your Heroine
The movie opens with Linda (Lake) breaking up with her kind, stable boyfriend because she wants to be “free”–only to soon learn from a doctor that she has breast cancer and needs surgery. Although I’m wary of films that show women making perfectly valid decisions for themselves, then seeming to have something horrible happen to them, Linda later questions what she did, or didn’t, do to deserve the diagnosis. This showed me not only the guilt that can occur as a survivor, but lessened the feeling that Linda was punished for making the reasonable choice to break up with her boyfriend.

Of course, stories wouldn’t be interesting without the main characters being somewhat flawed and encountering difficulty and challenges. I think it’s about timing, and more importantly, what comes before the difficulty. Is it the heroine getting in trouble as a result of character traits, actions, or beliefs that she’s working on–or just something like showing perfectly-reasonable agency?

Lesson Two: If You Want to Be Stylistically Quirky, Do It From the Start
As Linda faces the news, surgery, and recovery, the script interjects interviews with various characters–her friends, boss, even Linda herself. This usually makes for a more interesting movie, but starting nearly seven minutes into the film, it was jolting. Seven minutes may not seem very long, but in our short-attention-span culture, introducing a new style at that point felt strange. I would’ve liked to see the film start with an interview, or at least introduce one only a couple minutes in.

Lesson Three: You’ve Got to Have Friends (That People Like)
Matters of Life and Dating has warmth and humor, much of it due to the supporting characters, particularly Linda’s best friend, Carla (Rachael Harris), and her “cancer friend” Nicole (Holly Robinson Peete). Ricki Lake, in the lead role, felt wooden at first, her witty comebacks not as tight as Harris’s or emotional as Peete’s. Having a great supporting cast made the movie more enjoyable, especially as I adjusted to Lake’s more no-nonsense delivery (which I did come to appreciate).

So does it work? As a romance, Matters mostly delivers. You’ll spot the hero when he appears, maybe because he’s got the looks and the funny lines and they don’t get along at first. They’ll end up together, of course, but it’s almost like an afterthought because the real meat of the story is in Linda’s fumbling love life post-surgery and pre-HEA. She’s nervous to be naked. She jumps into the arms of an ex only to discover he’s disturbed by her surgery. She gets back with the kind boyfriend at the beginning because she’s afraid of being sick and alone. Most of Linda’s processing of her cancer and the changes in her body are seen within her discussions with friends, and maybe because of those actresses’ strengths, those scenes felt more emotional than the final romance.

Be warned that there’s a lot of alcohol in this film. Somebody’s always drinking something from a large, beautiful glass. I suspect the alcohol-to-scene ratio in this movie is something like 1:2. I got buzzed from watching.

So tune it on for the story, stay for the friendship and feels, and try not to get drunk in the process.