All About Steve (2009)

All About Steve arrives from 2009, a year when a romantic comedy could still be built on the premise of a woman constructing crossword puzzles and following a stranger across four states. Sandra Bullock plays Mary Horowitz, a Sacramento Herald wordsmith who treats her hamster as her closest confidante and cannot stop explaining etymology at people. After a single blind date, she decides that Steve, a network cameraman played by Bradley Cooper, is her destiny. The film then sends her crisscrossing the country in pursuit, and the audience is asked to find this charming. The Razzies found it otherwise. So did nearly everyone.

Mary is a study in quirk rendered as condition. She is hyper-verbal, socially oblivious, and incapable of reading a room, and the film treats these traits as adorable rather than clinical. Her arc is the standard one for such characters: a collection of fellow misfits (a trucker, two protesters, a man who carves apples into celebrities) gradually accepts her exactly as she is. This is the film's one genuine claim to contemporary sensibility, a soft argument that the odd deserve belonging. Around it sits a thin satire of cable news, where a reporter played by Thomas Haden Church exploits Mary's trivia for a shot at the anchor desk. The film finds ratings culture distasteful, which is not the same as finding it unjust.

Everything concludes in a collapsed mine with deaf children, which is a sentence worth sitting with. Mary rescues herself, hands the credit to a lesser man, and delivers a closing voiceover about setting people free. The lesson concerns self-worth, not society. There is no ethnic commentary, no queerness, no environmental sermon, no economic grievance. This leaves a badly reviewed comedy about a woman learning to like herself, a modest and ancient ambition. The cultural historians may file it under 2009 and move along.