The World’s Worst Chick Flick Part 11: He’s Just Not That Into You
I have endured several unendurable movies for this series on the search for the world’s worst chick flick. Most of the movies I had seen beforehand and just watched them again to make sure I didn’t forget anything. But for this week’s movie, He’s Just Not That Into You, I’m going to wing it and not re-watch it.
He’s Just Not That Into You has about 87 different couples coupling it up and breaking up and doing stupid stuff, so I thought I’d make it easy by using photos. Because photos are worth 1000 words and I’m guessing you don’t want to read 87,000 different words about this movie. Worth noting: This movie is like six degrees of Kevin Bacon because everyone is somehow connected to each other. Let’s do this thing:
Gigi and Alex
Gigi and Alex meet in a bar after Gigi decides to try stalking her last date at his favorite bar. Alex is the bartender and when he realizes what Gigi’s doing, he gives her advice and tells it to her like it is. If a guy doesn’t call, he’s not into you. Alex also tells her that she just has bad taste in men. They become friends and Gigi begins going to Alex for all her dating advice. You’ll never believe this, but she falls for him and thinks he’s falling for her too. She misreads all the signals (or sees what she wants to see) and things get awkward when she makes a move and he’s all “Hollup, hollup, hollup…” Gigi yells at him and says that he’s going to end up alone because he’s afraid of commitment. He realizes that she’s right and they end up together. Here’s my question: Did Alex end up with her because he really did love her, or because he didn’t want to be alone? In six months after a big fight, is he going to realize that he’d rather be alone than with a crazy woman who stalks her dates?
Janine, Ben and Anna
Next, we have the love triangle of Janine, Ben, and Anna. Actually, it’s not a love triangle. It’s just that Ben is a jerk and Anna is a homewrecker. Janine and Ben are married and Ben is apparently getting the seven-year itch. He meets Anna at a grocery store and one things leads to another and they’re having an affair. But neither one of them is much of a catch or all that into commitment, so in the end all three of them are alone. Except Janine is alone because she kicked Ben out and decided that he should live the life he wants to live. Ben and Anna are alone and seem kind of pathetic.
Neil and Beth
Beth and Neil are the least annoying couple in this movie. They’ve been together for years, but are unmarried. Beth finally tells Neil that she wants to get married, but Neil doesn’t think they need to get married. They break up, but when Beth’s father gets sick and Neil shows up to help her family through this hard time, she realizes what a great guy he is (unlike the loser husbands of her sisters). So she tells Ben that she doesn’t need marriage, but she does need him. He then realizes that he wants marriage and he wants Beth. Neil and Beth live happily ever after.
Mary and Barry
Barry and Mary don’t meet until the end of the movie. Barry was the bad date of Gigi’s at the beginning of the movie and Mary has spent the whole movie complaining about men. She also gives Ann horrible advice and basically tells her that it’s okay to be a homewrecker because what if he’s “The One.”
Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, here’s the bottom line: The title lies. He is into you, and if he’s not into you, it’s because he’s a loser. It’s not you, it’s him. Or it’s because he’s not “The One” and “The One” is right around the corner. When Alex is being brutally honest with Gigi, he explains that every woman wants to be the exception to the rule, but hardly anyone is. Except, of course, all the people in this movie. So they continue perpetuating a cliché that life really is like a romantic comedy, even when we say it isn’t.
The first time I saw this movie, I liked it at first. But then I just kept thinking about it and over-analyzing it and seeing just how screwed up it is. The people in this movie who aren’t obsessed with finding someone who “completes them” are made out to be horrible, while the women who are convinced they won’t be happy while they’re single are given exactly what they want. It’s just not a great message for anyone to hear.
Taking Back Tiffany 
I am also extremely critical of chick flicks (and movies and books in general). I just can’t turn that part off. However, there’s often good with the bad, and I think maybe you’d like “He’s Just Not That Into You” a little better with a second viewing. The plot I actually liked most was the Janine/Ben/Anna plot. I liked the Beth/Neil plot less because I think what they had going is exactly the kind of thing that screws a lot of people over by creating unrealistic expectations. However, I liked that they focused on a relationship between two people who had already been in a relationship for a long time, and the miscommunication between the two seemed to me like a completely real miscommunication that I’ve seen many times in real life. (Disclaimer: I am EXTREMELY partial to stories about people who are already married or have already been in a relationship for a long time. I generally feel like Hollywood doesn’t know what people should be looking for when they’re searching for love. Meet Cutes are my enemy.)
As for Janine, Ben, and Anna, they also felt more real to me. Ben is a guy who apparently doesn’t have a strong respect for Janine or marriage in general and is too obsessed with himself. Anna is a believable homewrecker with a shameful disrespect for marriage who searches for love in the wrong place (pushed by bad advice from a well-meaning friend) and compensates for her dissatisfaction by leading a sweet guy on. The sweet guy (Conner) provides her all the attention and adoration she could want, but she’s just not that into him. I’ve seen that a million times in real life. When Anna overhears Ben and his well-meaning wife having sex, Anna clues in on Ben’s selfishness, disrespect, and general pathetic-ness and fleas to an obviously unhealthy solution (Conner). Later, when Conner begins to talk about serious commitment, she does seem genuinely torn up about how her actions have affected him. Her reaction also seems to reveal that she wants true love and is upset that it hasn’t happened to her yet and that she can’t make it happen with Conner. Her end credit seen seems believable enough to me. She seems really unsure about herself, her expectations, and her goals. She plans on going to India with a presumably platonic friend in search of something like a deeper spirituality or some other secret of life because, by the end of the movie, Anna is acutely aware of her own harmful confusion.
Janine is my standout favorite. She stood up for herself in college by asking Ben to either marry her or move on. She proves that she respects their wedding vows even when Ben didn’t. When Gigi asks Janine if she’ll split with Ben, Janine tells Gigi that Ben is her husband, not some boyfriend. She tries to be responsible by taking some of the blame, and I see in Jennifer Connelly’s acting a completely realistic response to someone cheating on their spouse. It’s clear that Ben’s unfaithful behaviors were a deep wound that she was willing to accept and move past for the sake of marriage and commitment. When she discovers that Ben was also lying about smoking even though he knew Janine’s father died from lung cancer, she goes into an extremely brief rage, throws his stuff out, and breaks a mirror. (My favorite part is how she immediately calms down to regular old crying and grabs a broom to clean up her mess. It’s very well acted.) Nevertheless, his immaturity and betrayal doesn’t stop her from being her best self. When Ben comes home (after we see him outside of Anna’s workplace to presumably win his mistress back), we see that Janine has carefully and respectfully organized all of Ben’s clothing and other property on the stairs with a note to notify Ben of her intention to divorce. In the credits of the film, I think she looks like she’s been exhausted from the ordeal, but that she’s ready to move forward in her life in healthy way.
And Ben? What we see in the credits is a man who hasn’t changed. He’s the same selfish man who only sees the world as it relates to him, and now he’s embarrassed to talk about how he failed at marriage and how two gorgeous women left him. All three end the movie single, but the two women seem to end in a period of growth. I honestly wish more movies ended on a breakup. Hollywood is bad at showing us good relationships, so I think the least they could to is identify this inability and use it to show viewers what bad relationships are, how/when to put your foot down, and how to move forward. In my opinion, Hollywood should also show more people discovering happiness in the single life after a break-up. While I agree that this movie can be a bit of a standard chick flick at times (people end up together that have insufficient reasons to be together), I am willing to offer it forgiveness because of the Beth/Neil plot and especially the Janine/Ben/Anna plot. I hope you give “He’s Just Not That Into You” another try.
I was a little unclear before, but I was really proud of Janine when she found evidence of more of Ben’s lies. Previous to this discovery, she was able to forgive Ben for a one-time betrayal that he seemingly took responsibility for. After this discovery, she realized that Ben was a liar who wasn’t taking anything about her, her values, their relationship, or their marriage seriously. I felt for her character when she tried to move forward in their relationship because she thought they were both trying to take responsibility out of respect for each other and their commitment, but I equally respected her when she ended the relationship because she knew his commitment to their marriage was and always would be a sham.