A few nights ago I had the dubious pleasure of watching Sandra Bullock’s The Proposal, the second of her three films this year. Along with Bullock the film stars Ryan Reynolds and is a fairly formulaic romantic comedy: a man and a woman initially dislike each other, are forced to spend time in one another’s company, finally manage to separate only to discover that they’ve fallen in love. It’s the same story over and over again. However, The Proposal throws a curve ball into the mix: Sandra Bullock plays the role of the older, more powerful professional, while himbo Reynolds is the plucky underling who falls in love as a result of his superiors coercion. In other words, The Proposal reverses the typical romantic comedy gender roles.
Or does it? Though Sandra Bullock, as a vile and reviled publishing boss, is definitely playing against her type she can’t really shake her Sandra Bullock-ishness. The role she’s been given is basically trying to be Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, but Bullock really just comes off the same way she does in every post-Speed movie. Though this tension between her supposed evilness and her obvious charm actually makes the movie more entertaining, it also begins to undermine the legitimacy of The Proposal’s gender reversal. Much like Miss Congeniality, this latest film casts Bullock in a man’s role but is narratively concerned with removing her feminist veneer to reveal the awkward, tomboyish Bullock archetype. In that sense it’s not unlike several of Barbara Stanwyck’s films that cast the golden era starlet as a spunky working girl who nonetheless ends up in a very traditional relationship.
The process by which Bullock’s feminist veneer is removed further raises questions about the feminist slant of the film. Though the initial gender reversal is laudable (Reynolds, for example, is accused of sleeping his way to professional success much as a woman might be in a less progressive movie) the end of the film basically ends like any romantic comedy with the man proposing to the woman. (This is not a spoiler, as the inevitable end of any romantic comedy is a heterosexual coupling.) It’s trite, but in this case it’s also particularly disappointing because The Proposal had seemingly already done away with that particular convention when it had had Bullock getting down on her knees to proposal to Reynolds earlier in the film.
In any case, The Proposal begins with what could be an interesting premise but slowly unravels everything it has going for it so that by the conclusion it’s just business as usual. Hollywood often takes a lot of flack for supposedly being “liberal” and trying to push a progressive agenda. When some (overly conservative) person watched the film they probably lamented the fact that the film seems to endorse woman’s rights and gender equality. However and unfortunately for those of us who actually believe in those things, the film actually condemns them and advocates the gender disparity status quo that it might have been trying to dispel. In the end, then, The Proposal shows that men are in control and women are just schemers trying to find a husband.
