Do offices in a romcom even have HR? So asks Rebel Wilson’s character, Natalie, in the new self-aware (more on that later) romantic comedy Isn’t It Romantic, produced by and starring Wilson herself. Spoilers ahead, but I’m not sure the film accomplishes all it sets out to do regarding the romcom. This movie, depending on who you asked, was either supposed to be a cynical take-down of the romcom or a love letter to the genre. Or both. Possibly both. There is a lot that’s working here, but this kind of tonal confusion means that Isn’t it Romantic says a lot about the quirks of the genre without actually saying anything of substance. Hot take, but I stand by it. Honestly, by the end of the movie, I’m inclined to wonder where HR is alongside Natalie from the beginning. Maybe whisked away with the lavender-scented New York that is the stuff of romcom dreams.

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Serious question: are romcoms capable of subtlety? And if not, what does that say about the viewer? There seems to be this underlying belief that the (largely female) audience of a romcom needs the most obvious of exposition or character building in order to understand the characters portrayed on the screen. Case in point: in the opening shots of Isn’t It Romantic, the filmmakers show us Natalie is an architect through a quick shot of a stack of architecture books, appropriately messy. Architecture, with its implied glamorous New York office and proximity to men in hard hats, is an appropriate job for any self-respecting romcom queen. There is an immediate thrill in seeing Rebel Wilson, a plus-size woman, get the kind of romcom treatment usually reserved for the Meg Ryans or Kate Hudsons of the world, going about her day to day work life with the possibility of grand-gesture-level romcom love.  

 

As the romcom heroine of this narrative, Natalie (of course) lives in New York City, working at a kind of shabby architecture firm where she seems to be the go-to girl for parking lots. Yes, parking lots, the kind of work little girls dream of doing when they study their asses off for an architecture degree and, in Natalie’s case, move from the literal other side of the world in Australia to the Big Apple. Clearly, the film wants us to believe Natalie is undervalued at her workplace. She’s got a stack of architecture books in her home, after all.

 

The (maybe?) tired trope of the put-upon career woman is played out in full force in the first scenes we get to see of Natalie in her workplace. She’s told to fix the copier. A male coworker has the AUDACITY to ask her, as his peer, to throw away his trash for him. Yet, although she seems to be nervous to give a big pitch to the incredibly handsome investor (Liam Hemsworth), she seems kind of happy in her job. She likes her coworkers, particularly her romcom-obsessed assistant and her goofy friend Josh, played by Adam Devine. She seems pretty much content with parking lots, pee-scented New York, and a job that she feels good at, even if it isn’t a career. Although many romcom heroines seem to work a OK or even boring job as a stepping stone for a larger career, Natalie doesn’t seem to feel that way. She’s good at parking lots, and she’s seemingly happy just working on those. And yet, by the end of the film, we’re supposed to pity that Natalie, the one who “settled for less.” This is peak “Lean In” feminism,  and I’m not sure I’m into it.

 

After Natalie hits her head and wakes up in a romantic comedy (which is maybe my dream and also my nightmare??), her job is one of the first places where the audience sees real change. Her office is legit gorgeous, with high ceilings, sleek colors, and high-tech everything. We’ve gotten rid of the beige, people. Natalie works in the maybe the most glamorous office the set decorator could imagine, and her position at the architecture firm has gotten an upgrade to match. She’s the star architect, but the film isn’t quite invested in telling us what that means. Her nice assistant is now her bitchy work rival, a trope the screenwriters don’t really bother to explain more than that. Yes, the film is trying to parody the fact that many women in romcoms don’t have friends at work, only rivals, but just pointing it out isn’t enough for the audience to understand it with any nuance. Why does it have to be this way? Why can’t women support one another at work? The film just moves on. Another change in her office: the people who used to ask her to do things now bow down to the architecture goddess that she apparently is.

 

Her job is more glamorous, sure, and she seems more successful, but in this new romcom land, I couldn’t exactly work out what made this version of Natalie fulfilled at work. What’s wrong with loving parking lot design? That is a real sentence I said out loud in the theater as the film rolled along. Why does this movie feel the need to draw a direct comparison between “successful” romcom Natalie and “non-successful” real world Natalie by ditching the part of her job she seemed to actually like in favor of some ambiguous picture of work designed to appear like this Natalie is at the top of her game. The film seems to say that because she’s in this romcom, the specifics of her job no longer matter. I might even argue that her job in this romcom land is worse, with a lack of friends at work and a general sense of dissatisfaction with the kind of success she has here. In this romcom fantasy, Natalie is chosen to design the “big project”(a hotel? Maybe? The film didn’t care all that much so I don’t either) for Hemsworth’s character, but we don’t even get to see her do it. Instead, the camera focuses on Natalie and her beautiful apartment, not the work she’s actually sketching out. Her job matters not at all in romcom land, while it definitely did to Natalie in the real world, parking lots and all.

 

Although Isn’t It Romantic draws attention to the cliches of a working woman in a romcom, I found myself a little frustrated that it didn’t seem all that invested in going deeper than that. Why does Natalie need the fancy office and the fancy projects to be happy? The mundane, humdrum business of parking lot design, which would maybe drive me insane, seemed to make her happy at the beginning. The film makes us think that head-down, work-focused Natalie isn’t worthy of a romantic relationship because she is too focused on her work and afraid to be vulnerable. It’s like the film can’t commit — is Natalie empowered at the beginning because she prioritizes a career over romance, or should we pity her for that? Does she need the romcom to learn a lesson about a work/life balance and that a man’s belief in her means she can pursue more opportunities at work? Is it bad that she was content where she was before?

 

Natalie’s job intertwines with her romantic relationships in troubling ways both in and out of the romcom fantasy sequence. If you’ve seen any romcom ever, then you know from the get-go that Josh is in love with Natalie. He’s obviously staring at her, not the giant picture of Priyanka Chopra. Duh. When she falls into romcom land, she is immediately thrown into a relationship with the (now Australian) Liam Hemsworth, whose character is named Blake. I know that because I had to look it up. I’m only human, so the entire film I was just entranced by Liam Hemsworth’s mere presence that I couldn’t remember his name. He is, problematically, still the big client at her firm, which is a complicated mess for HR. The film does use her relationship with him to point out some of the complexities and pitfalls of the inter-office romance, namely when Blake uses her designs and passes them off as his idea to impress his boss/father. And yet, the film can’t commit to the idea that dating someone in your work life isn’t all roses and ice cream dates. When Natalie comes to and rejoins reality, her new/old love interest is Josh, also her coworker. Blake is an asshole again and Josh is the cute boy right in front of her nose, but her commitment to her work made it so that she missed him. Again, still another problem for HR. The resolution in the final act of the film feels to me like it can’t quite resolve Natalie as the empowered woman who loves her career with the Natalie of the romcom, who, by necessity, ends up in a relationship. Isn’t It Romantic seems to set up this as an either/or choice, but maybe it doesn’t need to be?

 

I’ve read a lot about this film since I saw it, and one thing I think needs to be discussed that hasn’t really been yet is how the film treats the career of its other central female characters, Priyanka Chopra’s character, Isabella. She only exists as a speaking character in the romcom land section in the middle of the film — before Natalie hits her head, we only see Isabella as a model on a poster outside of Natalie’s office, one she thinks Josh is fantasizing over when he is CLEARLY staring at Natalie. Isabella, then, is seen as an embodiment of the false hopes of the romcom that Natalie despises, a beautiful, unattainable woman who would get the guy in a romcom. After Natalie wakes up out of the romcom, Isabella is missing from the film entirely. When we meet her in the romcom of Natalie’s nightmares, Isabella’s job is mocked by the characters. She identifies herself as a yoga ambassador and a swimsuit model (but really a role model).

 

If you’re rolling your eyes, it’s because the film is practically begging you to. There is nothing revolutionary about a woman in a romcom having a frivolous and seemingly made-up job — as Natalie remarks to Isabella, ambassadors are for countries, not yoga — but what was troubling to me about the way the film treats Chopra’s character is that she doesn’t get a voice outside of the cliche. We don’t ever get to see what reality is like for Isabella. For a film that seems to want to poke holes in cliche, this seems like a huge blindspot. Natalie gets a transformation of her job after coming out of the romcom, but Isabella doesn’t. She’s a prop for Natalie and Josh to get together, and her job means less to the film than it does to the characters in it.

 

So how does this all shake down? Is Isn’t It Romantic the anti-romcom of the 2010s? Does it do to the genre like Scary Movie did for horror movies? Did we finally get a version of a working woman in a romcom that reflected life? Well, no, obviously not. Is it a step in the right direction? I’m also gonna go with no. Natalie isn’t the romcom heroine to finally get it right, and I genuinely know less about what it would be like to be an architect than I did when the film started.