Be aware, this article includes spoilers!
As with all great epiphanies, it began with a conversation about Andie MacDowell.
My then girlfriend and I were watching Four Weddings and a Funeral, and I couldn’t understand why she hated MacDowell’s American love interest to Hugh Grant’s foppish protagonist.
This woman was clever, irreverent, and — as many a millennial’s mug and/or t-shirt has read — chaotic. Good chaotic.
That’s when I learnt the phrase: manic pixie dream girl. MPDG for short.
She hated MacDowell’s character because she was, in her view, part of a lineage of female characters written by men for men.
A pretty, free-spirited, whacky female romantic lead who’s thrillingly uncomplicated for Grant’s bumbling minor royal. Uncomplicated precisely because she was designed as some ethereal ideal, not a three-dimensional human being.
Once you know how to spot them, MPDGs are everywhere. 500 Days of Summer, Scott Pilgrim vs the World and Elizabeth Town also include variations on the archetype.
I mean, fair play, they make good films.
Which leads me to last Sunday afternoon, retreating from 30° Sheffield sunshine to the cinema, thoroughly enjoying the new Manchester-based romcom ‘Finding Emily’.
Starring Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice — astonishingly, neither are stage names — as, respectively, a working-class Mancunian (Owen) desperately searching for a girl he met on a night out, and a chirpy American (Emily) who’s secretly using him as a case study for her dissertation on why love makes you mad.
Talented leads, sharp writing, a Minnie Driver cameo; if you’re partial to the odd 1990’s romcom – which, reader, I am – then it delivers.
However, watching Fearn’s floppy-haired, lovesick beagle of a man bounce between the Northern Quarter and the University of Manchester campus, something clicked.
I realised they’d swapped them around. The G for a B. MPDB. Owen is the manic pixie dream boy.
Looking like the air-brushed love child of Liam Gallagher and Ian Brown, he veers between states of doe-eyed innocence, boundless wanderlust and comatose yearning. When he’s hurt, it’s always undeserved, due to someone else’s hand, our kid wouldn’t hurt a fly.
He’s 24, didn’t go to university, and yet, simultaneously, naive. Impossibly so. When he does say or do something accidentally controversial, his expression is that of a puppy who’s just urinated on the carpet unsure why his new family are shouting at him.
Owen is a Britpop band poster incarnate, with all the problematic comments to tabloids, drug abuse and class-based-angst stripped away.
There is an attempt at pathos. He’s still recovering from the death of his mum, a year before the events on screen, and, in his words “spent a lot of time thinking about death” in the aftermath. However, luckily for viewers and the increasingly smitten Iowan he’s talking to, he doesn’t dwell much on this, swiftly following this with confirmation that he now “tries to think about living instead.”
Now, ultimately, this is fine. In fact, as with the much-derided MPDGs, his personality helps makes the film what it is. Warm, engaging and funny. His innocence is mined for humour and his energy advances the plot.
Finding Emily also makes some effort to subvert its genre’s routine gender dynamic. Owen is the zany, kooky, mug-and/or-t-shirt-slogan-personality, whilst Emily’s life is more structured. She also performs the mandatory grand gesture to win a reluctant Owen over in the film’s denouement.
In short, the dynamic works.
Yet, sitting in that cinema, insulated from a rare South-Yorkshire heatwave, there was a niggle of annoyance brewing at the back of my mind.
Perhaps this is just me being churlish, it was two hours well-spent in the cinema, why moan about it? A touch of jealousy about Manchester’s renaissance and the north’s romanticisation – in contrast to my home region of the West-Midlands – is likely also sewn into it. I mean, nobody’s planning a romcom in Birmingham are they? A final act confession of undying love may never be delivered, on screen, in a Black Country accent.
But, in lieu of a therapist’s note confirming otherwise, I believe it’s primarily because the film’s creators had all the required pieces – cast, setting, script – to create a more nuanced portrait of love.
They decided to reverse the MPDG trope, not remove it, and that’s a shame. For all Finding Emily’s merits, it’s an opportunity missed.
