Some actresses were born to play Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Zooey Deschanel is the first name that springs to mind. Unfortunately for the nepo baby (her cinematographer dad, Caleb, is a six-time Oscar nominee whose filmography includes Being There, The Right Stuff, National Treasure, and The Passion of the Christ), that means enduring lots of annoying questions from interviewers about how she feels about embodying the archetype.
Audrey Hepburn was similarly a savvy choice to play quirky dream girls because she’s physically pixie-like and seemed too beautiful, charming, and pure to be real and not a man’s impossible fantasy. As the ultimate hippie chick, Goldie Hawn was perfect for roles calling for her to imbue the lives of mopey sad sacks with passion, love, and light.
Sandra Bullock, on the other hand, is anything but a natural Manic Pixie Dream Girl. America’s Sweetheart seems too sensible, solid, and straight to play fantasy women who exist only in the fertile imaginations of male screenwriters.
That’s why the geniuses behind the 1999 romantic comedy Forces of Nature give Sarah Lewis, the wild child Bullock plays, a subtle streak of purple in her hair to convey that she’s a rebel and a loner with an irrepressible lust for life that she feels compelled to share with the right uptight dork.
This mildly eccentric follicular choice establishes that Sarah is a spontaneous free spirit, not the wholesome girl next door.
Ben Affleck plays Ben Holmes, the aforementioned uptight dork. He’s a writer, of sorts, but his peculiar specialty involves writing jacket blurbs for the books of more talented and successful scribes. The New Yorker is scheduled to marry fiancée Bridget Cahill (Maura Tierney) in a glamorous wedding in picturesque Savannah, Georgia (where my family vacationed a few weeks back, incidentally), in just a few days, but a deeply misogynistic universe keeps sending him unsubtle signs that marriage would be a mistake for him, and every other man in the world.
On a train, Ben talks to what appears to be a happily married old couple but finds out that they’re married to other people and having an affair that provides the old woman with the sexual satisfaction and mind-blowing orgasms she never dreamed possible when she was shackled by marriage to her loser husband.
The first omen that Ben should rethink his boring desire to marry a perfectly lovely woman comes when his grandpa has a cardiac incident at his grandson’s bachelor party when a stripper grinds up against him. In the hospital, the old man tells his son that he regrets his marriage to a shrew he wasn’t at all attracted to, and wishes that he’d played the field and had sex with other women. Lots of other women.
On a flight to Georgia, Ben is unfortunate enough to sit next to a casual misogynist who responds to his seatmate’s imminent nuptials by telling him the horrific details of his own failed marriage. More fortuitously, Ben sits next to Sarah, who can’t help but glance at his computer, where he is struggling to write his wedding vows because he’s scared of life, and scared of love, and needs a sassy wild card to teach him to embrace, rather than hide from, life and all its mysteries.
Thankfully, Sarah happens to be such a magical creature. She’s a twice-divorced kook too flighty to stick with a job for too long. She’s done just about everything, including working as an exotic dancer. She delivers her philosophy, and the philosophy of all Manic Pixie Dream Girls, when she tells him, “Life is supposed to be a ride, right? Do you want to be on your deathbed saying, “I lived by all the rules” or “I lived!” Cause I’ve lived. I’ve loved. I fought, I broke hearts. I screamed, I bled.”
Ben initially seems like he’d like to die knowing that he’d followed all the rules until migratory misadventures with Sarah convince him that there’s something to be said for living, loving, fighting, breaking hearts, screaming, and bleeding.
A seagull deeply concerned with the state of Ben’s soul sacrifices itself for the sake of his future happiness by grounding the plane by flying into its engine. Sarah, who was introduced making out at the airport with a sleazeball with Nickelback facial hair, played by X frontman John Doe, is so grateful to be alive that she kisses Ben on the mouth in an only semi-romantic fashion.
A spooked Ben is too scared to want to fly on a plane ever again, so Sarah secures them a ride with Vic (Jack Kehler), another marriage-hater who gets them into trouble with the fuzz by smoking a joint that attracts the unwanted attention of law enforcement.
Being a crazy rebel, Sarah takes a toke, but Ben demurs on the grounds that smoking marijuana is illegal. They’re attractive straight white people, so they are released almost immediately. After bad luck with planes and then automobiles, they opt for a train.
When asked if he wants to sit with Sarah, Ben says he wouldn’t feel comfortable sitting next to a woman he felt a spark of chemistry with so close to his wedding, only for Sarah to insist she felt nothing.
He can’t get rid of Sarah that easily. He’s sitting in his assigned seat, like a real wuss, when he sees Sarah standing ON top of the train. Why sit in a train like a total normie loser when you can stand on top of the train and howl your lungs out while admiring a sunset?
Sarah transforms Ben’s black-and-white ten-inch TV of a life into Technicolor Cinerama. She turns a casual trip to a 24-hour K-Mart into a consumer wonderland of childlike delight.
For reasons too stupid and convoluted to get into, Sarah convinces Ben to pretend to be her doctor husband so they can board a bus full of old people bound for Florida.
Sarah and Ben end up in the honeymoon suite of a hotel where they trade insults before smooching passionately before stopping before things get too hot and heavy.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s former profession comes in handy when they find themselves in desperate need of 150 dollars to buy a broken-down car that will hopefully get them to Savannah.
For some inexplicable reason, Ben keeps referring to Sarah’s former trade as “strip dancing.” It feels like a deeply misguided executive felt that referring to the female lead as a stripper who made money by stripping made her seem too sleazy, but calling it “strip dancing” is somehow classier and less offensive.
Ben and Sarah enter a bar, where she volunteers to strip-dance for the patrons to earn enough money to buy the cheapest car in human history. The unimpressed bartender turns her down because he works at a gay bar. If she were more observant, Sarah may have noticed the dearth of female patrons.
The bartender is not wholly uninterested in the pair, however. Ben makes an unexpected debut as a strip dancer when he strip dances for the money needed to procure transportation to get them to the next stop.
Storms threaten Ben’s big day, but he comes to realize that Sarah is a human hurricane of whimsy and passion. She is truly a force of nature.
Back in Savannah, Bridget reconnects with an old boyfriend who desperately wants to marry her.
I watched and reviewed Forces of Nature at the time of its release, but I did not remember whether the leads end up together.
After 102 minutes of being told by myriad supporting characters that marriage is a waking nightmare that promises untold, unending misery, Ben decides to go through with it after all, while Sarah reconnects with the child she had abandoned.
That seems strangely faithful to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl ethos. They’re surprise summer storms who sweep in unexpectedly, then leave just as suddenly. They work their magic quickly, then disappear. They’re Manic Pixie Dream Girls, not Manic Pixie Dream Wives or Manic Pixie Dream Ex-Wives.
Sarah is messier than most examples of her breed. She was a teenage mother, has two ex-husbands, and a ten-year-old child she hasn’t seen in years, but her flamboyant personality and thematic purpose—helping an uptight dope be less afraid and more passionate and engaged—fit the archetype snugly.
At the end of the shoot, Bullock cut off the single strand of her purple-dyed hair and went back to her more wholesome, less sassy persona. It must have been a relief for her and the audience alike, because Manic Pixie Dream Girls like Sarah are supposed to be exhilarating and irresistible, but for the most part are just exhausting.
Previous Manic Pixie Dream Girls:
Summer (Zooey Deschanel) from (500) Days of Summer
Next Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Polly (Jennifer Aniston) from Along Came Polly
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