Best Keanu: “If you want to be a dominatrix that badly, why don’t we go out and buy you the leather and get it over with?”

That’s kind of the central question at the beginning of Sweet November: Is this a kind of sanitized dom sub relationship? Or what Hollywood scriptwriters believe is a sanitized dom sub relationship? What is this, exactly?

Because it’s strange for a rom-com. (Although, ok, this isn’t exactly a rom-com.) The way that Sara, played by Charlize Theron, pursues Nelson, played by Keanu, falls into the distinct category of “not okay.”

He asks her for answers during a DMV test, and she’s the one who gets kicked out for cheating. She then engages in a weird sort of stalking, and eventually asks him to live with her for one month — November — for her self-made therapy program where he can learn to have a life outside of work.

Nelson, this being movie world in the early 2000s, has a high-pressure job at an ad agency. If he were a female lead, he’d of course have a high-pressure job at a magazine. This was the era before big tech, so even though Sweet November is set in San Francisco, there are no trips out to sprawling campuses of social media companies.

Nelson’s an asshole, and when he and Sara start to copulate for the first time, he reacts badly when she asks him to “slow down.” He leaves in a huff and on the street accuses her of “telling him how to fuck.”

Yes, it’s all quite strange for a rom-com. But once I decided, “ok, this is going to be a window onto an unhealthy series of interactions between two people (because is it a relationship? Hard to tell at this point), but even that can be interesting,” I was on board.

I like that people are not one thing or another, and relationships aren’t always healthy or wise — but it is still possible to learn stuff from less-than-ideal relationships and from people you probably shouldn’t spend too much time with. In other words, nothing’s perfect, and movies are not always obligated to only shed a light on what should be the ideal.

Sweet November lost me a little when Nelson and Sara fell into a bit of normalcy — when he stepped back from his work and they became happy-couple-like. The unhealthy beginning to the relationship is somewhat forgotten, and we’re in typical rom-com land, without the com.

Sweet November gained me back a little when Sara’s secret was revealed. (Spoiler: she’s terminally ill). Once Nelson finds out about her cancer, she pushes him away, somewhat predictably, and he goes out of his way to court her, somewhat predictably. But it made me think about illness, and relationships, and what kind of love you want around you when you’re feeling that vulnerable.

Sweet November is another remake, and the 1968 original appears to have a similar plot. Maybe in 1968, Sara’s actions were a little less “not okay,” than they are in 2022 or even were in 2001. So, one could ask whether this film is likable as a plain old romance.

Sure, maybe. But surprisingly, Charlize Theron and Keanu Reeves have very little chemistry. It was strange to watch; by this point, I’m used to seeing Keanu have chemistry with most of his co-stars, regardless of gender, and he and Charlize are two of my favorites — granted less for their romantic prowess than their status as bona fide action stars.

In any event, because of that curiosity of the dud-like chemistry between the actors, next on my viewing agenda is The Devil’s Advocate, the Keanu-Charlize-Al Pacino flick that preceded Sweet November. Maybe they had no chemistry in that one either, but it’s been so long, I can barely remember.

March 2022