Books & Drinks (Cowper, 2024)

I can tell you the exact moment the movie lost me.

David, our hero, has traveled to the Dominican Republic to sell his deceased father’s “mansion” after receiving the sort of inheritance that used to only happen in Dickens novels. While there he falls in love with the local culture in general and his pretty young real-estate agent, Maria, in particular. The mix of Orientalism (exotic otherness of the indigenous people) and colonialism (an average guy with a failing bookstore in America becomes Prince Charming in a third-world paradise), is uncomfortable to begin with. He’s got a girlfriend/fiance/something — it doesn’t really matter what she is, only that she is enough of a shrew to make us want to root for David to prefer cheating even though it’s, you know, cheating. He decides to go swimming with his real-estate agent because it’s hot out there for a pimp, and as he is looking for a swimsuit for her, his significant other has to walk in on him and the woman he is totally not having an emotional affair with wearing nothing but a towel. “It’s not what you think!” David cries, even though it’s pretty much exactly what she thinks. Darn those rom-com girlfriends and their irritating tendency to walk in at just the wrong moment.

To be as fair as I can be, the film does have David eventually owning up to the fact that, yeah, he wants the full island girl experience and not the familiar girlfriend experience. I would hardly be the first to point out that the rom-com genre doesn’t treat its female characters well. What’s weirdly offputting about this one is the smugness with which it apparently thinks it is doing something new, cute, or clever. In the press package, director Geoffrey Cowper describes the tone as “feel good,” hoping that it would inspire people to “fight for the people they love” while not “settl[ing]” for a “comfortable life.” These are all nice thoughts, but why does it mean lying and hurting the present girlfriend? In slightly less egregious versions of the castrating-ex trope, we would see her pressuring him to be drab, to settle for an unhappy life, and at least recognize that his escape from her is something more than just a jerkish desire to be free. But here the current partner isn’t exactly calling on him to live a life of quiet desperation so much as to…not lie to himself or others, keep his word, treat her and others with respect.

The title of Books & Drinks comes from the fact that David runs a failing bookstore before he inherits the house. You might expect, given the title, that this profession is central to the story in some way, but it really isn’t. The bookstore could be any sort of failing business endeavor that he wants to escape from. Similarly, the Dominican Republic setting isn’t material to the plot in any real way. It could be Hawaii, or Mexico, or Peru, or Alaska (like Sandra Bullock’s The Proposal), or wherever Virgin River is set. Self-imposed geographical exile as an external symbol of escape is as old as Gaugin going to Tahiti or Thoreau going to Walden Pond (okay, it’s older, actually, I just used the two examples that most readily came to mind.) That this trope is old, doesn’t make it bad. Many of these stories are successful, and they can speak to a deep-seated yearning for something that we believe is lost in modernity. But absent a clear-eyed and fair picture of what is being escaped, these stories risk becoming overgrown versions of Peter Pan — boys who don’t want to grow up because playing on the beach with your newfound girlfriend is always a nicer fantasy than living as an adult in the world of responsibility. I actually think it is possible to do the latter and be happy, to cultivate and pursue one’s dreams in a way that is something other than narcissistic or egotistical.

I wonder if somewhere in the Dominican Republic there is an indie filmmaker with a script about a man yearning to escape the confines and limitations of the island by immigrating to the United States after inheriting a small, independent bookstore from a relative he never knew. I might actually like to see that one.