The Rewrite. Romantic Comedies and the Sharp Pre-MeToo/Post-MeToo Divide

I recently watched the aggressively mediocre 2014 Hugh Grant romantic comedy The Re-Write for The Fractured Mirror, my massive upcoming tome about American movies about the film industry. 

In it, Grant plays a has been screenwriter who won an Academy Award fifteen years earlier for a movie that everyone seemingly knows and loves but cannot find work in his field after three consecutive flops. 

In desperation his agent suggests that he accept a position teaching screenwriting at a lovely college that, in a crazy coincidence, just so happens to be the writer-director’s alma mater. 

Grant is introduced as a bit of a sleazeball but because he’s played by Hugh Grant we’re supposed to find his horniness acceptable and excusable, if not downright charming. 

When choosing students for his class, for example, he chooses beautiful women and a few male geeks he’s certain will not prove romantic competition for him. 

It does not take long for Grant to have sex with one of his students, a gorgeous coed who is young enough to be his daughter or possibly his granddaughter. 

The movie does not look at this transgression favorably. It knows that a professor sleeping with his much younger student crosses a clear-cut line and represents an obvious abuse of power. 

But the movie also clearly does not see its hero breaking school rules by fucking a teenager he will be grading as that big of a deal. 

Hey, he’s a horny, lonely, depressed, divorced dude. Is he not going to have sex with a hot student? The Rewrite goes even further by positing the student as the sexual aggressor and her teacher as the easily seduced. She casually mentions that she previously slept with three of her professors. 

This alarms the horny professor, both because it makes him feel less special and desirable and because he clearly thinks less of her because she has considerable experience when it comes to sleeping with much older men. 

The Rewrite posits the student’s sleeping with her professors as a harmless part of her sexual education.

Grant’s character knows damn well that it is against the rules for a professor to have sex with a student but he also thinks that it’s such a minor transgression that it would be wrong for him to get into trouble for it. 

The Rewrite implicitly codes the sexually adventurous student who hooks up with Grant as a whore and Marisa Tomei’s free spirited single mom, who is ALSO in Grant’s class, as the age-appropriate mother Grant should end up with. 

I can’t help but imagine that The Rewrite would be a much different movie if it were made in 2023. That’s because MeToo changed everything where portrayals of power imbalances are concerned. 

The Rewrite would need to be rewritten, appropriately enough, in order to fit a post-MeToo world. If The Rewrite were made today I suspect that the professor having sex with his student repeatedly subplot would be dropped completely or altered so that the hot to trot student comes onto the professor but he rejects her because he has a clear set of boundaries. 

It certainly would not be treated as no big deal, or a matter of a horny nymphet seducing a man who, to be fair, is very open to being seduced. 

We’re much more critical and sensitive about huge age gaps in romantic relationships and men abusing their power to have sex with vulnerable women. Consider the wave of negative attention Chris Evans received for marrying a 26 year old sixteen years younger than himself. I don’t think that would have happened in a pre-MeToo world, where a male celebrity having a much younger partner would be considered business as usual.

Filmmakers can’t get away with portraying men in their fifties having sex with teenagers as a harmless lark anymore anymore. That is a positive development on both a moral and narrative level because professors sleeping with their students is a tired cliche that should be retired.

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