Valentine’s for Misanthropes

A playlist

Valentine’s Day is a bullshit pseudo-holiday created by a self-fulfilling industry bent on making every retail outlet in America look like a really sad MySpace wall. My contempt doesn’t stem from romantic spite, mind you. It’s the tackiness of masturbatory capitalism. If we were doing it like the Celts, with the Maypoles, nudity and paganism, I would probably see the value.

But since I’m here to talk movies, here’s a short list of cinematic rebuttals to Hollywood’s formulaic, heart-warming fantasies of amour, which have been fueling unrealistic romantic expectations for way too long. 

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are narcissistic academics trapped in a dysfunctional marriage who self-destruct over an awkward night of getting shit-faced with a younger faculty couple, portrayed by Sandy Dennis and George Segal.

The film is electric. What begins as the blackest of comedies turns into a stunning drama, crackling with the performances elicited by director Mike Nichols. Haskell Wexler’s intimate, rich cinematography is peerless. But the real joy is the delicious contempt at the heart of Burton and Taylor’s demented marriage, sizzling with a spite and sarcasm so charming that it inevitably brings out the worst in their unsuspecting guests.

Irreversible (2002)
Violent. Pornographic. Heartbreaking. Those are the words that come to mind for Gaspar Noe’s avant-garde revenge fable.

The brutal murder of a drug dealer sets a narrative in backwards motion, revealing in one (cleverly edited) continuous looping shot the events that led up to the murder. 

The fulcrum is the devastating 12-minute rape of Monica Bellucci’s Alex, which contextualizes the wrath of her boyfriend, Marcus (Vincent Cassel). As the narrative moves back in time we discover their idyllic romance before, which makes the inevitability of what we’ve already seen even more painful. The crushing nihilism of the film’s final reveal is nothing short of Noe unapologetically telling hope, dreams, and the audience to fuck off. 

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Ever been so devastated by an erstwhile significant other that you wished you could just erase them from your memory as if they never existed? That’s the conceit behind Michel Gondry’s mind-bending, Charlie Kaufman-penned, emo-classic starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.

Joel and Clementine meet on a commuter train, not realizing they’ve already been through a contentious two-year relationship that they’ve both had erased by a futuristic firm, Lacuna, Inc. But history has a way of repeating itself.

While not as mean-spirited as the others on this list, “Sunshine” remains a sad, moving, and quirky elegy to soulmates lost in time. A bittersweet palliative which tricks you, like a mirage, into giving that thoroughly broken relationship another shot, despite all better judgement—proving that hope is so very pointless. 

Happiness (1998)
Todd Solondz’s deeply twisted, yet oddly sweet ensemble dramedy should come with a psychiatrist’s commentary on the DVD. (Note: this one is rated NC-17—not so much because of what you see, but what is said.)

The story of three sisters in various states of romantic disaffection, Solondz takes us on a sometimes repulsively frank journey through their lives.

Oldest sister Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) comes to realize her psychiatrist hubby Bill (Dylan Baker, in a role he’ll never live down) is a serial pedophile. Middle-sister Jordan (Lara Flynn Boyle), successful yet unfulfilled, becomes obsessed with meeting a man who makes obscene phone calls to her apartment while masturbating (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Joy (Jane Adams) is the ineffectual dreamer continually overrun by the loves that life has to offer. 

Solondz gives them all a level moral playing field, no matter how odious some of them are, which, at times, has the inverse effect of making the audience deeply uncomfortable even while earning their sympathy. 

Valentine’s Day (2010)
The Ikea of movies. Director Gary Marshall shamelessly rips off the Richard Curtis rom-com epic “Love Actually” with this star-studded ensemble tale of attractive yuppies that somehow can’t get it together in the romantic realm.

I despise sugary insincerity and this is certainly that—a brutally long, manipulative, Tony Montana-sized pile of saccharine horseshit. The inhuman levels of contempt for the audience exhibited by putting the Taylors Lautner and Swift in the same goddamn movie speaks to the sadism burning in the pit of Gary Marshall’s cold, dead heart. R.I.P., asshole.

For more from Joe, read his review of Martin Scorsese’s “Silence.”