alyissad

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit up front that I enjoyed The Proposal. It was funny, had a really cute puppy, a naked Ryan Reynolds, and a feisty Betty White. It was a comedy first and foremost; the romance was an after thought. Which was refreshing in a way. The “romance” in romantic comedies is often so stifling, unbelievable, slap dash, and cliché, it was a relief to feel like the actors felt the same way, and put more effort into delivering punchy lines than making doe eyes. However, all the quips delivered by the adorable Ryan Reynolds could not distract me from the big sparkly elephant in the room. Race.

In The Proposal, Sandra Bullock plays Margret, a Canadian who works for a publishing company in New York, who blackmails her personal assistant Andrew, (played by Reynolds) into marrying her so she can stay in US and keep her job. There is nothing particularly new about the quickie Green Card marriage plot, but the immigrants in question are usually a little more….immigranty. They at least have an accent. Gérard Depardieu in Green Card at least sounded foreign. In other movies that deal with the same plot, the laugh are often constructed around the otherness of the troubled deportee. Not so in The Proposal. Margret is “just like us”, and the comedy is framed ...