Meg Ryan has had it with romantic comedies, at least for now. The time has come for something more serious, she tells Hugh Linehan
'I can't do romantic comedies any more," says Meg Ryan, curled up on a couch in a London hotel suite. And who could blame her? Like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, the formula for a Meg Ryan rom-com is well-established to the point of fossilisation. Nice but neurotic Meg has busy life but something's missing. Bloke shows up. Meg hates bloke. Bloke hates Meg. They fall in love. They fall out of love. They fall back in love again, for ever and ever. Cue swelling music and credits.
The bloke has been played successively by Billy Crystal, Tom Hanks and Kevin Kline. In her latest film, Kate and Leopold, it's rising Australian star Hugh Jackman as a 19th-century English gentleman, transported through time (don't ask) and deposited in the New York apartment of Meg, a nice but neurotic advertising executive, who has a busy life but something's missing . . . you know the rest.
The charming and unpretentious Jackman comes rather well out of the whole thing, but there's something depressingly formulaic about Kate and Leopold. Does Ryan know while shooting a film whether the chemistry works? "You never really know," she says. "Because sometimes you think it clicks with somebody, and then it just doesn't come off at all. Other times you think this is just not working, and somehow it does. Something happens in that camera, between getting it in there and projecting it. Something mystifying."
To be fair to Ryan, she's tried to break out of the rom-com trap, but with mixed results: unconvincingly as a Gulf War heroine in the military drama Courage Under Fire; gushingly as an alcoholic in the melodrama When a Man Loves a Woman; forgettably in City of Angels, the misbegotten re-make of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire. She was better in the black comedy Addicted to Love, where she played a black-clad obsessive who spends her time spying on her ex and his new lover.
"It's funny, because that's so much closer to my sense of humour in real life, than the romantic comedies," she says of Addicted to Love. "What I like about doing the romantic comedies, although they're hard for me, is there are things that happen technically on the set that don't happen in other movies. You have to sustain long takes, because generally a lot of the time it's about the rhythm of the scene, so they don't want to cut and you might end up doing three or four pages of continuous dialogue. Whereas, when we were doing Courage Under Fire, they might have me scream one word during the whole day - usually 'No!'. The rest of the day they spend setting up the helicopters and the firearms and the explosives."
It must, though, become rather tedious, following the same narrative arc as in all her other romantic comedies. In the US, where Kate and Leopold was not very well received, many reviewers suggested that the law of diminishing returns was beginning to apply to Ryan's particular schtick of ditziness and arrogance brought down to earth by the love of a good man. "It's a convention in that genre," she says. "Katharine Hepburn was always getting taken down from her high-and-mightiness, Carole Lombard was the same. It's sort of what happens to women in romantic comedies. You're taken down a peg and taught a lesson. You expand your life and you let in chaos, because your universe is too ordered. That's what happens in this movie."
It may be just a fluffy fairytale, but I still wonder about the basic premise of Kate and Leopold, which seems to suggest that a contemporary, professional woman is far more likely to find happiness in Victorian marriage than in the present day.
"Well, yeah, that's kind of what the movie's about," she says. "There's something out of whack about how over-stimulated, and multi-tasked the modern woman's life is. Leopold comes in and has this way of extending time around her. There's so much value in that. It's what I talk to my women friends about. We have so much to do. We're always feeling a little bit overwhelmed, and how do we manage it, how do we keep some balance? Kate is somebody who's an ambitious person in a male way, and that's not an integrated way to be. She's also had this broken heart, and put all that energy into her career, so she's a little screwed up, and she needs an overwhelming experience, a magic man to show up."
Is being overstretched or out of whack a particularly female problem, then? "Well, remember in the 1980s there were all those stories about overstressed, overly ambitious men who had to learn about the value of life? It's very interesting now, the way there are so many over-extended female characters in movies, because we're learning the lessons you learned 20 years ago. All these new doors have opened for us, so why wouldn't we try to step through all of them at once? Everybody has to do it. You're a mom and a wife and a career woman, and everybody has to balance those things. I haven't done it well."
This is the nearest she gets to mentioning the much-reported collapse two years ago of her 10-year marriage to actor Dennis Quaid, arising from her even-more-reported affair with Russell Crowe on the set of the kidnapping thriller Proof of Life.
Ryan and Quaid divorced last year, and the whole episode put something of a dent in that wholesome America's Sweetheart image (probably no bad thing from a career point of view, if nothing else). Quaid has been quoted as saying that the couple had grown apart due to their juggling of work and family (they have a 10-year-old son, Jack). They would take turns, with one parent staying at home while the other was shooting a film, so they saw each other less and less.
Now, she says, she tries to do only one film per year. "I'm a mom, mostly. I just gave up my production company because I felt I just didn't have the time. Generally I do a movie in the spring, have summer with my son, then promote the movie in the fall. That's a good pace for me."
HAVING turned 40, does she find that roles for women start to get thinner on the ground? "I really think that's such an outmoded question," she says. "As the baby-boomer generation gets older, there's a different outlook. There's a more mature audience which wants to see more complicated dilemmas. The whole idea of movies is that they're myths, and that we work things out as a group and as a culture by watching these projections on the screen. Interesting drama and conflict in our lives is normally between choosing two good things and two bad things, not between the obvious good and bad. Our lives are interesting and complicated because we're asked to make choices between things that aren't black and white. I want to see that reflected in movies as I get older. I'm not interested in playing an ingenue, so it's lucky that they're not interested in having me play one. I've never made a living as a sex symbol, so those rules have never applied to me, and at 40 I'm not missing anything in my life."
Maybe so, but Hollywood isn't exactly churning out films for that more mature audience.
"Probably not, but there are some. Maybe I'm the wrong person to ask because I'm just not interested in going to see a lot of those movies, in watching something formulaic."
She's determined, though, to keep trying to step out of the rom-com genre. "I have to stop. Just for a little while, anyway. I hope I get to do them as long as Cary Grant did them, but the next couple of films aren't like that at all. The next one is based on the life of Jackie Kallen, the only woman who's successfully managed a middleweight boxing champion. She's a totally different character from anything I've done in a long while."
Kate and Leopold opens next Friday