Rom-Com Review: Matters of Life and Dating

Writers Who Read: Laura Madeline Writers Who Read: Pamela DiFrancesco

Rom-Com Review: Matters of Life and Dating

Along with compiling Netflix lists with Jenny Vinyl, I’m starting to write longer reviews of movies on this site. With a lot of screenwriting tips and tricks increasingly being used by novelists, watching rom-coms is a great way to learn about telling a romantic story in any form.

But really, who needs an excuse to watch some awkward fumbling, snappy dialogue, and grand gestures? I’ll be focusing mostly on films languishing in my Netflix Instant queue, with the occasional newer release.

First up: Matters of Life and Dating, a 2007 Lifetime film starring Ricki Lake as a single woman trying to negotiate being a breast cancer survivor and her love life. The story is based on the life of Linda Dackman, the cancer survivor and author of the memoir Up Front who helped pen the script. Many shows featuring cancer patients and survivors feature older, often married characters or teens with the illness. I was drawn to the unique premise of a thirty-something woman facing cancer and a mastectomy and the effect it had on her dating life: her sexuality, her feelings of attractiveness, her fears of being alone.

The movie opens with Linda (Lake) breaking up with her kind, stable boyfriend because she wants to be “free”–only to learn from a doctor that she has breast cancer and needs surgery. Although I’m wary of films that show women making perfectly valid decisions for themselves, then seeming to get punished, Linda later questions what she did, or didn’t, do to deserve the diagnosis, showing the guilt that can occur.

As Linda faces the news, surgery, and recovery, the script interjects interviews with various characters–her friends, boss, even Linda herself. This usually makes for a more interesting movie, but starting nearly seven minutes into the film, it was jolting. Seven minutes may not seem very long, but in our short-attention-span culture, introducing a new style at that point felt strange.

However, despite that initial unevenness, Matters of Life and Dating has warmth and humor, much of it due to the supporting characters, particularly Linda’s best friend, Carla (Rachael Harris), and her “cancer friend” Nicole (Holly Robinson Peete). Ricki Lake, in the lead role, felt wooden at first, her witty comebacks not as tight as Harris’s or emotional as Peete’s. But, as the film wore on I came to appreciate Lake’s more no-nonsense delivery.

As a romance, Matters mostly delivers. You’ll spot the hero when he appears, maybe because he’s got the looks and the funny lines and they don’t get along at first. They’ll end up together, of course, but it’s almost like an afterthought because the real meat of the story is in Linda’s fumbling love life post-surgery and pre-HEA. She’s nervous to be naked. She jumps into the arms of an ex only to discover he’s disturbed by her surgery. She gets back with the kind boyfriend at the beginning because she’s afraid of being sick and alone. Most of Linda’s processing of her cancer and the changes in her body are seen within her discussions with friends, and maybe because of those actresses’ strengths, those scenes felt more emotional than the final romance.

Be warned that there’s a lot of alcohol in this film. Somebody’s always drinking something from a large, beautiful glass. I suspect the alcohol-to-scene ratio in this movie is something like 1:2. I got buzzed from watching.

So turn it on for the story, stay for the friendship and feels, and try not to get drunk in the process.