25 years on, Julia Roberts not getting the guy is iconic

Twenty-five years ago, Julia Roberts matter-of-factly said that if you’re somehow unmarried at 28 years of age the only logical thing to do is to marry your best friend.

She does not say this as if it is a particularly controversial statement. Her other best friend, George (Rupert Everett) does not seem shocked (he is gay and therefore not the kind of best friend she is allowed to marry). People need to be married. Fair enough!

My Best Friend’s Wedding, the subversive 1997 hit by Aussie P.J. Hogan, broke the rules of Hollywood romcom lore.

Oh no wait, that’s not fair enough. That’s quite strange. What happens if you’re unmarried at 28? Do they round up the whole ring-less lot of you and transport you to a secluded island that’s far enough away from the normal married 28-year-olds, so as not to unsettle them with your reckless, tragic presence? It was also the year that Ginger Spice called Prince Charles “very sexy” – maybe people just had very different values in 1997.

Marriage deadlines generally are very overrated, but that’s besides the point. We forgive this strange plot device because it’s an anomaly in what is otherwise a flawless film. P.J. Hogan’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, the story of Jules (Roberts) trying to break up her soulmate Michael (Dermot Mulroney) and his fiancé Kimmy (Cameron Diaz) four days before their wedding, was a global box office hit. It catapulted Julia Roberts – who was already a household name after Pretty Woman in 1990 – into the sort of rare global superstardom that has continued to burn for over 20 years.

So how could this movie possibly be underrated? I’ll tell you. My Best Friend’s Wedding boldly breaks one of the most consistent rules in romantic comedy lore: the adorable heroine – despite executing every demonic, love-motivated act in the playbook, despite being entitled to the romantic lead in all the ways we’re taught that movie love works – does not get the guy at the end.

Hang on a minute. So it doesn’t matter that Jules loved Michael first (sure, they only dated for one month back when they were at uni, but that’s irrelevant)? It doesn’t matter that Jules is the kind of movie dream girl who goes to baseball games, drinks tequila, never wears pink and can carry eight beers on a tray with one hand? It doesn’t matter that Michael once loved her enough to cut her finger with a razor and make her swear that they’d get married one day? Kimmy still wins? She didn’t even have to get cut with a razor first!

Movie romances don’t always work out, it’s true. Casablanca wouldn’t be Casablanca if at the end Ingrid Bergman said, “I’m sorry darling, I can’t get on this plane and fight Nazism with you, I’m going to chill at this gin joint instead”? But in ’90s romantic comedies, they almost always do.

Romcoms serve as comfort food, reinforcing values that we want to believe are true: your one true love will love you back, your good deeds will be recognised, your adoration will be rewarded. The genre has instilled in us that no matter what our hero or heroine does, no matter how dastardly, dishonest or frankly illegal their actions, in the pursuit of true love everything is just. A kiss from the object of your affections (who you have earned through your lunacy) will wipe the slate clean.

Let’s look at the evidence. In While You Were Sleeping, it doesn’t matter that Sandra Bullock has lied about being engaged to his comatose brother, Bill Pullman proposes to her anyway. In Never Been Kissed, it’s fine that Drew Barrymore pretended to be a high school student, she gets her English teacher in the end. Think it’s weird that Meg Ryan would embrace Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail after he ruined her family business and catfished her via email? Well, it’s not! In romcoms, you can do anything in the pursuit of love and it’ll be forgiven when you get together at the end. Committing insane acts just proves how much you love the person.

But that’s not how it works in My Best Friend’s Wedding. Sure, it hits conventional tropes in other ways. Michael is clueless to Jules’ schemes, and as dull as baking paper. Jules, as a tomboy, is positioned as being cooler than feminine Kimmy. Jules’ gay best friend is always available to hop on a plane to be by her side.

The Verdicts

• Overrated: Bob Dylan, a great poet? A great delusion more like it
• Overrated: Upstairs, Downstairs, who cares? Can we be done with Downton Abbey, please?
• Underrated: Thanks Apple, but we don’t need new emojis. The perfect option already exists
• Underrated: Agadoo’s fruit-fuelled hellscape is high art, and you can’t convince me otherwise
• Overrated: It’s time to dump Dumbledore

But the revolutionary bit is that even though Jules performs all the expected, absurd schemes she can to earn Michael – including, but not limited to: convincing Kimmy to ask Michael to quit his low-paid job, sending an insulting email from Kimmy’s dad to Michael’s boss, making up a fake fiancé of her own – it doesn’t work. She doesn’t even come close. The last third of the film is just a compilation of different characters telling her that Michael does not love her.

We’re used to this ending now, but it was considered so daring at the time that they originally shot a version of the ending where Jules does not get the guy, but at least gets a guy – a man named Andy played by John Corbett who just happens to be at Michael’s wedding. But test audiences hated Consolation Andy. The studio hustled and took a risk, re-shooting the end using a version of Ron Bass’ original script, where Jules doesn’t get Michael or Consolation Andy, but dances at the wedding with George instead. The fact that My Best Friend’s Wedding is directed by an Australian, who are not as fixated on happy endings as mainstream American filmmakers seem to be, made all the difference.

My Best Friend’s Wedding poses the idea that maybe feeling like you’re entitled to someone’s love isn’t necessarily something to be rewarded and being single is… actually okay. Jules doesn’t get married and the world does not explode. Is it possible that we don’t need to get married by 28, or get married at all, to have a rich life that is full of love? Seems suspicious. But if it’s in a romcom, it must be true.

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