We all know that men and women don’t always think alike. When it comes romance and relationships, it seems that the divide between male and female perspectives couldn’t get any wider. The question is: if men and women see romance so differently, how in the world do we ever manage to get on the same page? And the movie that tries to answer that question this summer: The Ugly Truth.
At the center of The Ugly Truth is Abby Richter (Katherine Heigl), a beautiful and successful morning radio show producer whose only failing seems to be her inability to hold down a man. In an amusing opening sequence that captures the chaos and comedy of putting on a morning show, we see that Abby is a woman who knows how to take charge and who is all about using what she knows to get exactly what she wants. The problem: when that same behavior follows her from work to date.
Cue one of the movie’s funnier scenes in which Abby starts methodically cataloging the ways her date doesn’t live up to his profile before their drinks have even arrived. Follow it up with a late-night call into Mike Chadway’s (Gerard Butler) cable access show The Ugly Truth in which Abby argues that there’s more to hooking a man than having a model’s body and a porn star’s skill-set. And set into motion a faceoff between a woman’s view of love and a man’s take on lust when Mike not only joins the cast of Abby’s show, but makes a deal with Abby that if his logic does not get her the man of her dreams, he will quit.
While promising and amusingly entertaining at the get go, unfortunately, The Ugly Truth is really no more than a contrived collection of amusing situations that fail to add up to much of any sum. However, despite its weak development and unconvincing chemistry, through its story are still delivered several truths that are worth thinking about.
Although both Abby and Mike begin the film with nearly opposite views of love and relationship, the film is one that essentially ends up acknowledging and disproving them both. As we see, if all a woman has to hook a man is five seconds in passing on a city street, looks really are about the only hand she’s got to play. If a woman manages to get a minute or two more to grab a man’s attention, Mike’s rules, however shallow, actually do make sense considering how easy it is to scare or bore a man away. But as the story unfolds and both Abby and Mike find themselves relating to each other and others beyond more than just an initial meeting, what they both discover is that when it comes to love and relationships, simply following a certain set of rules or seeking out a specific set of qualifications just isn’t going to cut it.
Yes, when the movie begins, the “ugly truth” is that very often there are only a select few attributes which will cause a man to fall for a woman and that the ideal man who many of us women search for simply doesn’t exist. However, as the film unfolds, perhaps the even harder-to-swallow truth is that finding love is about a much more complex set of variables. As Abby reveals from the beginning and Mike dares to show a bit later on, while shortlists and specific qualities may drive their initial consideration of someone as a romantic interest, both of them ultimately desire a relationship with someone who has the ability to do more than just look good on paper. In time, we discover that both of them ultimately want to be someone who can be of value to another person for more than just one night. And as love based on a carefully-crafted image topples in the face of love based on full disclosure, we see that while it is not impossible get someone to say “I love you” based on careful strategy, far more powerful is the love that falls for us just as we are.
As we see through Abby, the problem with love gained by trying to be someone we are not is that whatever love we receive will never feel like it is actually for us. As she tells the man who ends up falling for her carefully crafted image instead of the qualities that actually make her who she is, “I couldn’t show you any of that. Because who would love somebody like that? No one.” But as the movie reveals, that is not true. While each of us may have aspects of ourselves that are flawed, scary, boring, or even offensive, only when someone knows those pieces of us and still loves us can we know that they actually love who we are, not who we wish we could be, who we think we should be, or who we can only be fifty percent of the time. As much as it is great to know love when you are dressed to the nines and at the pinnacle of your career success, how much more precious is it to know that you might know love when you have been unemployed for over a year and haven’t showered in a week? And as encouraging as it is to know that there might be a person out there capable of loving us flaws-and-all for a lifetime, even more powerful is the reality that God, the only being who actually knows every single aspect of who we are, loves us so much that He sacrificed His own life just so He could be in relationship with us for eternity.
