Ben and Jen flip the gender script

Gigli

Directed by Martin Brest

Pundits unite around ridiculing Gigli but still fall for the guileful Seabiscuit. Stupidity confirmed. It’s easy to see what’s wrong with Gigli: Another quirky Martin Brest project with too much commercial compromise. Yet those who lambaste this comic romance (about two hit-persons in love) are the same types who praised Brest’s unforgivable Scent of a Woman, in which the blind protagonist drives a sports car!

Clearly there are kinds of sentimentality that media mobs favor. They condemn others as a way to pretend intellectual superiority. Because the American public is so frequently made into asses by publicists, the rare occasion of a Hollywood movie arriving with negative buzz gives everyone the chance to get even–even if it means ignoring the small part of Gigli that makes it the only Hollywood movie of the summer with ideas: Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck turn sexual conventions (and their off-screen celebrity) upside down.

Lopez plays Ricki, a no-nonsense contractor hired to watch soft-hearted fellow Larry Gigli (Affleck) kidnap a mentally challenged teenager on the orders of his mob boss. She’s not only swifter than Gigli, but inured to his advances. And here’s where the movie gets interesting. Unlike the typical romantic comedy stringing out a courtship until the final clinch, Ricki and Gigli indulge in a genuine battle of the sexes. J-Lo and Affleck flip cliches by playing characters who actually investigate the meaning of the roles men and women play. It’s unusual for mainstream stars to admit that much social behavior is the result of learned attitudes; they don’t dare question the date-night conventions to which Hollywood caters.

Sure, Gigli’s artificial. But if you’re willing to believe in the off-screen Lopez-Affleck engagement as something more than simply tabloid entertainment (as news?), you might consider attending to their big-screen hypothetical. It, at least, serves a purpose. The initial mismatch between Ricki and Gigli sublimates the media gossip generated by the white and Latina couple’s ethnic crosscurrents. J-Lo essays another character of indeterminate ethnicity, but this time, instead of circumventing complication, she delays the punch line and makes it a whammy: sex.

Ricki tells Gigli he isn’t her type, that she’s a lesbian. And she means it. His double-take reaction is a comic version of the public’s fascination. Thus, received notions of masculinity and femininity (and interracial attraction) are turned into farce. Though clichéd, Gigli forces audiences to contend with multiculti coupling through the frisson of sexual tension. The pay-off is not in sparkling dialogue or witty plot development, but the sparkling, sometimes witty exhibition of the stars’ audacity. Think of the Liz Taylor—Richard Burton Cleopatra without all that narrative lumber. Imagine the most unexpected role-reversal comedy since Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Sylvia Scarlett.

Gigli eventually resorts to the same conventions that make Nora Ephron movies a snooze, but before then it turns gender fuck into genre fuck. Mainstream romantic comedies are seldom about the bluster men and women need to shake off, but Gigli questions the patriarchal font of behavior that underlies popular storytelling. Affleck’s Larry Gigli ("It rhymes with ‘really,’" he says) is a guy’s guy who has played out his repertoire of street-tough defenses. ("I have no compunctions," Gigli lies.) He’s ordered about by Louis (Lenny Venito), a gross, dim-witted, macho fool, but Ricki teaches him new positions. She calls Gigli her "bitch," and he, on his back, looks up in wonderment as she mounts him.

"Keep an open mind, because you never know," Gigli is told when introducing Ricki to his mother (Lainie Kazan), a walking soufflé of quivering flesh and sexual mystery. "Life is not always black and white," Mom advises, and the film’s best moments pursue the gray area of human sexual resolve. A bolder film would have used Ricki’s education of Gigli to undermine the vicious masculinity of the criminal world–the place Scorsese dares not go–by recognizing Gigli’s own homosexuality. Brest’s screenplay is half way there in the couple’s "Bull and Cow " discussion about who is "at the top of the must-fuck pyramid." This critique of traditional masculinity is more intriguing than the plot twist in The Mexican, with James Gandolfini playing a gay mobster who comes out to Julia Roberts. Brest pushes toward a more candid view of sexuality. Affleck goes through silly/pathetic muscle-bound mirror poses and J-Lo does a brazen though seductive speech about "what I’m proud to call my pussy." (In her Maxim pose, she acts right past the straight screenwriter’s bias.) Who could prefer the conventional pap of Sleepless in Seattle or Chasing Amy to this?

In the end, Gigli’s plot is no more than a pretext for the usual sexual tease (eventually corroborating the heterosexual "norm"). Too bad Brest doesn’t follow up his scrutiny of masculine routine by discarding the heinous cute-gangster formula. Surely he knows better: the young man Gigli and Ricki baby-sit, Brian (Justin Bartha), is an embryonic version of the machismo that imprisons Gigli and Louis (and guest intimidators Christopher Walken and Al Pacino). Brian expresses his social desire through his love of hiphop (Naughty by Nature’s "Everything’s Gonna Be Alright" and LL Cool J’s "I Need Love"), exemplifying the way our culture infantilizes men. All this is more interesting than Seabiscuit and Bad Boys II, which are just the same old boy’s story.

In spite of themselves, J-Lo’s, Affleck’s and Brest’s glamorous prevarications (Gigli repeats the basic lie that extortion and crime are fun) confide something about the roles people play in pursuit of personal pleasure, in obedience to social customs. Gigli is not entirely defendable, but taking a sharklike attitude toward movies like this (or Glitter) has nothing to do with criticism, it’s just conveniently snide. Mocking Gigli allows people to deliberately misread its signals and laugh away its discomforting jolt.