Things I Learned From Movie X: The Ugly Truth
By Edwin Davies
February 15, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com

I wish either or both of you were co-starring with me instead of Katherine Heigl.

Like death, taxes and the great taste of Charleston Chew, there are some things in the Universe which are inevitable and unavoidable. These things exist and, for good or bad, we must live with them. Incidentally, Charleston Chew falls on the “good” side of that equation. Then there are things which are avoidable, but seem completely inescapable because no one bothers to get out of the way, but instead stand there like a rabbit caught in headlights. The career of Katherine Heigl is a clear and terrifying example of the latter. Pretty much everyone smarter than a tire knows that she appears almost exclusively in terrible movies – assumingly because she hasn’t got an agent and gets work by picking up discarded scripts that Julia Roberts and Amy Adams leave on park benches – and the stories about her behavior towards the people she works with have confirmed that she has pretty much eclipsed Jimmy Carter as history’s greatest monster. Yet whenever she has a film out, people are actually willing to pay money to see it, almost as if the sheer dark horror of her draws them in like quicksand. Shrill, angular quicksand. Audiences seem to think that they have to watch them, and studios seem to think they have to keep commissioning them, when all anyone has to do to break this cycle of attrition is to just look away.

There is no more clear an example of this than The Ugly Truth, a ghastly cultural artefact from 2009 which future generations will view in much the same way that we view the actions of Genghis Khan: a mixture of awe and revulsion. By combining Heigl’s sheer awfulness with a bitter, misogynistic script and Gerard Butler at his most repellent, Robert Luketic and his team created a film that purported to be about the non-traditionally beautiful truth about men and women, which apparently is that we’re all assholes. Bracing though its nihilism may be, The Ugly Truth was meant to be a frothy romantic comedy, not a Neil LaBute play, and anyone with eyes and ears should have known that it was a wretched piece of bilious tripe. Yet it somehow managed to take $88.9 million in the United States alone. Truly, we as a culture are the rabbits, and Katherine is the blaring headlights that signal our demise even as we cannot turn away to save ourselves.

Still, if the old idiom that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it contains any truth whatsoever, then surely we must be able to take something away from The Ugly Truth other than a profound sense of disgust and self-loathing. At least I hope so, otherwise I’ve just wasted 90-something minutes of my life that I could have better used by staring into space for no discernible reason.

They’re just like Tracy and Hepburn, except they swear and are awful

The unique hook of The Ugly Truth – other than selling suicide as a viable life choice better than the theme to M*A*S*H* ever could, even though that admittedly hurt the takings of the film by reducing the possibility of repeat viewings – was that it purported to be a frank examination of the differences between men and women, as opposed to every other romantic comedy, most of which have actually claimed to that, some of them to great effect. (I’m looking at you, When Harry Met Sally. Not so fast, What Women Want.) “But, no, you see it’s different,” say the defenders of the film who I have just had to invent because they don’t fucking exist, “because they say cock and fuck and pussy. It’s real mature.”

In deference to my opponents, who I hold in high esteem because they are part of my own mind, and I really respect me, I grant that, yes, there is a lot of swearing in The Ugly Truth, and the frankness of its language would be bracing if the rest of the film was similarly challenging. Think of Knocked Up, one of only a handful of good films to feature Katherine Heigl (Under Siege 2 being the other), which used coarse language but also used its style and form to question the very nature of what a romantic comedy could be. In that instance, the form dictated the direction that the script took, so the use of harsh language felt natural to the story.

In The Ugly Truth, however, the story and general style of the film is about as straightforward as a romantic comedy can get. Heigl is a high strung career woman who is unlucky in love. Butler is the boorish new colleague who she initially hates, then comes to admire when he helps her get her perfect man, then they fall for each other and I don’t even need to finish that plot synopsis. If you don’t know how the film ends, then you either have never seen a romantic comedy before, or you have, but you also have the form of amnesia that Guy Pearce has in Memento, but every time you watch a formulaic romcom, it’s like you are watching it for the first time. What a blissful and charmed life you must lead.

Anyway, the film follows all the familiar beats, but instead of witty repartee or sexual chemistry, it awkwardly crams in arbitrary swear words and discussion of sex to no notable effect. Actually, that’s a slight lie: the scene in which Heigl accidentally goes to an important business meeting wearing vibrating underwear which is being controlled by an impish young child nearby is notable for trying to derive comedy from what is essentially sexual assault and failing quite spectacularly.

The whole enterprise just feels off and off-putting. No one wants to see a frothy romantic comedy featuring a load of swear words and endless discussions of masturbation any more than they want to see a movie about the Holocaust starring Jerry Lewis. Yet somehow we live in a world in which The Ugly Truth and The Day The Clown Cried both exist, though at least Jerry Lewis had the good sense to hide his monstrosity from the rest of the world.

Curse you, nuance!

There is a special relationship between Gerard Butler and Things I Learned From Movie X which I shall relate to you now, since failing to do so after mentioning it would just seem weird. When I started writing this series nearly two years ago, the inaugural column was on Law Abiding Citizen, a violent and really dumb action film in which Butler sets out to kill all the people involved with a miscarriage of justice, including people whose only relation to the original crime seemingly was that they knew that the concept of injustice existed. Shortly afterwards, I wrote about The Bounty Hunter, a film which somehow made the previously noble endeavour of hunting people for money seem tawdry and venal. I had hoped that The Ugly Truth could form the final part of my Gerard Butler triptych, which would be my own Three Colors Trilogy, except it would be one color, and that color would be the color of a grey autumn morning, soaked in bitter tears. Or magenta, I haven’t decided yet.

Whilst The Ugly Truth was pretty wretched, I found myself conflicted in my attitude towards Butler in the film. Sure, his character was repugnant, far more so than the characters he played in the other films I had taken to task in the past, and the film around him was similarly vile – his relationship advisor is basically the character that Tom Cruise plays in Magnolia, except The Ugly Truth doesn’t consider its character to be a horrible creep – but I couldn’t disengage myself from Butler’s performance in the way that I have before.

This reason for this is that the week before watching The Ugly Truth, I went to see Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut, Coriolanus, which is a bold film that somehow manages to turn one of Shakespeare’s most complicated and difficult plays into a thrilling, engaging piece of entertainment. It also stars Gerard Butler as Aufidius, the mortal enemy/begrudging ally of the prideful and brutal warrior Coriolanus and - despite everything that the rest of his career would suggest - Butler is absolutely fantastic in the role. It takes real skill to do Shakespeare well, and he so completely nails the character, not to mention holds his own against Fiennes at his most ferocious, that I came away with a completely different impression of Butler as an actor. I no longer viewed him as a meathead who never brings anything to his roles, but as a genuinely talented performer, albeit one who needs the right material to bring that talent to the fore.

This created an oddly paradoxical situation for me whilst watching The Ugly Truth. I felt both more warmly towards Butler because I had seen him do such great work elsewhere, and completely disdainful of him for exactly the same reason. Before, I would have dismissed it as yet another film in which Gerard Butler is terrible, since that’s the base level of quality I had come to expect from him. Coriolanus shattered the curve: I now knew that he could be great if he tried, he’s just very, very lazy.

Now, I’m not saying that The Ugly Truth would have been a better film if Butler had delivered all his lines in Iambic Pentameter, but I struggle to believe that it could have been any worse.