Something Borrowed (2011)

Something Borrowed arrives from 2011, an era when the romantic comedy still believed in the Hamptons wedding and the Chanel purse as a plot device. It concerns Rachel, a Manhattan attorney of impeccable niceness, who sleeps with the fiance of her oldest friend and then spends two hours feeling bad about it in tastefully furnished apartments. The film is adapted from Emily Giffin's novel and carries all the moral weight of a seating chart. The reviews were unkind. The box office was indifferent. Both verdicts were fair.

We are told this is a story about female friendship, and technically it is. Two women orbit each other with affection and resentment in roughly equal measure, and the screenplay grants Rachel an interior life. But the interior life is mostly about a man with good hair. The friendship serves as scaffolding for a love triangle, not as a thesis. Any suggestion that the film holds a position on loyalty, or on the ethics of wanting things, dissolves the moment Dex removes his shirt. This is not a movie about arguments. It is a movie about weather.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is bare. The cast is uniformly white and uniformly wealthy, and nobody in the frame seems to notice. There is no engagement with class despite the yachts, no engagement with race despite the city, no engagement with anything except the question of who will end up with whom. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns. The film proceeds to its conclusion like a caterer clearing plates. That absence of messaging is, in its own way, a kind of integrity. Here is a modest picture about attractive people making poor decisions, with no agenda beyond the box office, and it did not find one there either.