Green Card (1990)

Peter Weir's Green Card arrives from 1990, a year in which a romantic comedy could still be assembled from a Frenchman, an apartment, and a federal immigration interview. Gérard Depardieu plays Georges Fauré, a waiter whose visa is expiring. Andie MacDowell plays Brontë Parrish, a horticulturalist who requires a husband on paper to secure the lease of her dreams. The arrangement is fraudulent, the chemistry is eventual, and the enterprise coasts on charm for ninety minutes. Weir wrote the role specifically to introduce Depardieu to English-speaking audiences, and the film carries the relaxed confidence of a director who knows the machinery works.

The social content is thin, and the film seems content to leave it that way. Brontë keeps a greenhouse, frets about trees, and helps arrange a donation of plants to inner-city gardens overseen by the Green Guerrillas. This is gardening as character texture, not as sermon. She has a career and opinions and an apartment she wants badly enough to commit a crime for, which registers as a mild, pre-arranged independence. Nobody lectures. Nobody is corrected. The immigration agents are bureaucratic obstacles, not villains, and the nearest thing to a thesis is that opposites can share a piano bench.

What remains is a potato chip of a movie, to borrow a critic's phrase, and it knows it. The pleasures are Depardieu's ungovernable warmth and MacDowell's composure, set against Enya on the soundtrack and a New York that exists mostly indoors. It is pleasant, weightless, and entirely untroubled by the cultural questions we now insist on asking of everything. A relic, then. A genial one.