What Happens in Vegas

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched … ‘What Happens in Vegas’ a loud, obnoxious comedy that tried to be sweet in the most mechanical, overbudgeted, Hollywood mess. I have never seen Cameron Diaz look so unattractive. Ashton Kutcher proves he doesn’t have the talent to do light comedy.

Garish, bloated, with montage sequences filled with gags where skillful filmmakers would have put in scenes.

At yet at the end, they still choked me up. A bit.

Am I a softie, or was the movie better than I want to accept?

It did make me laugh at several places.

The story: cute slacker Kutcher works in his dad’s furniture business, but is a slacker who can never finish anything, he has a cute girlfriend who plays naughty sex games with him but even she would never want to marry him. Meanwhile obsessed, driven to be ‘perfect’ Diaz is a commodities trader who is engaged to a buttondown corporate type. She plans and executes an over-the-top ‘perfect’ surprise party for him, but when he walks in the door, before everybody can yell ‘Surprise!’ he dumps her. Meanwhile Kutcher’s dad finds him goofing off at work for the last time and fires him.

Both end up in Las Vegas to lick their wounds and get drunk and obnoxious but by a quirk of the screenwriter, they get booked into the same hotel room. So they ‘meet cute’ and go out drinking in Vegas, where they win some money, get totally smashed, end up speaking honestly to each other (which he never does) and getting loose to have fun (which she never does) and end up the next morning married. Which they both accept is a big mistake. And they tell each other that. But then, each feels a bit offended that the other agrees it was a mistake. So it turns into a big shouting match (did I mention the movie is loud, too? It is L.O.U.D. in every way it can be). And walk away from each other. Never to see each other again. Except…

…except that the quarter she leaves with him, he drops into the slot machine she was playing, and it wins three million dollars.

Which they both want. But they don’t want each other.

Back in New York, they try for an annulment, but each also wants all the money – out of spite, mainly. The judge is sick and tired of such people, and everybody in their generation, so he tells them they have to stay married for 6 months, must live together, and must see a marriage counsellor every week. He will tie up the money in escrow for all that time, and at the end they have to see him and he will decide.

So they’re stuck with each other. She must move into his apartment, but each is scheming to make the other give up and surrender the claim on the money in return for divorce. So there are all sorts of low, dirty, crude tricks they play on each other. Gross-out humor has been done grosser, but the writers and directors are not aiming for ‘class’ here by any means.

Of course along the way there is real attraction between them, and they grow closer together, though they can’t quite call off the war, they can’t quite tell the other they love them. We see that it is true, though, and we see that they balance each other well, that they learn from each other, and they could be a very good couple after all.

At the climax – there is a sort of double climax – they are first on a retreat for her company, where she must impress her boss to get a promotion over another girl, to leave the trading ‘pit’ and rise into an office. And Kutcher so charms the bosses, and shows them the fun side of Diaz, that the promotion will surely be hers. And they dance together, and in the hotel room, they want to sleep together … but it doesn’t happen, they are both a little bit too much on guard.

Second climax comes 2 scenes later. In between is a small scene that turns her feelings around totally: she meets up with her ex-fiance who asks her to take him back, and gives her the engagement ring again. She guesses correctly that Kutcher gave the ex the ring, and also told the ex some secrets that Diaz had confided in Kutcher. So at the second climax, the court hearing, Diaz proclaims that she is willing to give up all claim to the money if only she can have her divorce.

So Kutcher ‘wins’ what he wanted, but ‘loses’ what he needed. And he is unhappy.

What follows is a scene of Diaz at work, being given the promotion, and instead quitting. Meanwhile Kutcher goes back to work at the furniture shop and finally finishes a counter piece, to his father’s demanding satisfaction. But it isn’t enough for him, and he tries to find her, but she has vanished, and nobody knows where she is.

At the apartment, he finds something she left behind: a framed picture of a lighthouse. She told him the story behind the picture, it is of a place where she was happy, some 30 miles east of New York city. Kutcher drives along the coast looking at lighthouses, checking them against the picture, and finally, the fifth lighthouse is the one – and there she is. He proposes on the beach with a big speech about how terrible he was as her husband, but it was the best time of his life. And she answers with a big speech of her own, and accepts, and they kiss, and the camera cranes up and away to see them alone and kissing on a wide sandy beach before the setting sun…

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Hi Tim,

So, is the climax the retreat where they are closest together, but fail? or is it the courtroom scene where he gets what he wants but not what he needs? it would seem to be courtroom. But i note that there are only about 13 minutes of screen time after that, and much of that is credits. So call it under 10 minutes for the whole friggin’ third act?

The twist would have to be finding the photo of the lighthouse, though we know in the audience that this is the place he’ll find her – she only tells that lighthouse story at the retreat, so it’s fresh in our minds.

There is another twist, her rejecting the money. This is handled quite economically with a payoff, when the ex fiance gives her back the ring (that Kutcher had given to the ex, in hopes that the ex would come running after Diaz and wring her heart - which she sees almost as soon as she sees the ex has the ring).

Oddly enough, there is no ‘I’m sorry about that ring business’ and no forgiveness given for it. By our previous discussions, this would need to be atoned for in act three, as a means of winning her back - maybe by a cell phone or text message?

It’s possible that such a scene was in the screenplay, maybe even was shot, but it’s so obvious, and had no laughs, and was slowing things down, so they decided to cut it – and that may be the reason there are only 8 or 9 minutes after the divorce is granted?

There doesn’t have to be a twist to keep us interested, of course, if the third act is a dash to the finish line and clocks in so short anyhow.

Do we need to see that atoned for? or forgiven? I didn’t feel it, really, because I could see that Kutcher had moved on from that point, and so had Diaz, at the retreat. Even her lines to him at the divorce hearing, ‘Just a divorce is the only thing I ever want from you again.’ This is something spoken to hurt and wound and is a confession in itself.

‘So go on, get together, you’re so right for each other!’ We are impatient to get to that point now. Maybe a twist and back, the whole mechanics of it, as you suggest, are too busy.

There is no subplot (well, there is a love-hate relationship between the supporting best friends) and so if you don’t count the romantic comedy as a double-plot in and of itself, there is no other thread to tie up or deal with.

Maybe the twist could be the wrapping up of the B-story, which redounds upon the A-story in such a way as to impel the protagonist(s) to finish things once and for all? Since there is no B-story here, there is no twist. (A potential for such a twist might lie in developing the love-hate storyline of his-buddy and her-galpal: If they hook up at last, the buddy could learn from the galpal where Diaz is, and together they could manipulate the lovers to turn up at the same place and time, unbeknownst to each other – would that work?)

(21 March 2009)