Hughes: Forces of Nature (1999)

A sort of late 90s revision of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Forces of Nature feels in retrospect like the second part of a trilogy in which Sandra Bullock felt her way to the fringes of romantic comedy – or at least as far towards the fringes as blockbuster expectations would allow. Nestled between Hope Floatsand 28 Days, it’s a genuinely bizarre film that sees Bullock as Sarah Lewis, a manic pixie dream girl avant la lettre who teams up with Ben Holmes, played by Ben Affleck, when their plane from New York to Savannah is delayed due to a technical malfunction. Ben is heading to Savannah to marry his fiancee, played by Maura Tierney, and since there’s a very strict timeline for their nuptials, he finds himself banding together with Sarah to make his way down the Atlantic coast as rapidly and ingeniously as he can. Of course, everything that can go wrong does go wrong, from cyclones to wrong turns, while Ben and Sarah start to develop a rapport of their own which quickly – surprisingly quickly – leaves him questioning why he’s even getting married at all. On paper, that might make him sound a bit flighty, unsympathetic or downright unfaithful, but Hughes shoots the entire film like a wedding videographer, filling it with manic crash-zoom shots and curved, cantilevered compositions with lots of unexpected angles, taking her cues from the main departure terminal at Newark, where it all begins. Not only does that make Ben and Sarah’s romance feel like a bit of a fait accompli, but it’s such a catastrophic style that it tends to makes the various disasters that putatively punctuate the narrative feel incorporated into the style of the film before they even begin, which is kind of funny in the way that it makes every setback, no matter how large or small, feel equal – there’s just as much of a sense of crisis when Ben’s laptop runs out of battery as when he’s framed for a drug bust, just because everything seems to exist in a heightened state of crisis. Perhaps that’s why the journey feels more and more like a music video – while the small segments in Savannah, featuring Maura Tierney, become more and more staidly classical by comparison – as the sheer unrealism of romantic comedy, and its fixation with meet-cutes, actually starts to pull the film away from both romance and comedy towards something darker and more obsessive. Nowhere is that clearer than in the film’s pessimism about marriage, since, to avoid Affleck’s character coming off as a total bastard, the screenwriters have to ensure that pretty much everyone he meets has a cautionary tale to tell about marriage, even elderly couples who would seem to be perfectly content at a passing glance. And, in that end, that gives the lie to Ben’s connection with Sarah, or at least makes you realise how different this kind of promiscuous meet-cute really is from a permanent relationship, which is perhaps why watching it finally feels like witnessing the romantic comedy starting to shed its skin, the feel-good affect that dominated so much 90s blockbuster cinema restless and anxious to feel something else instead.