There are hundreds of reasons we should welcome the new trend of movies featuring women who aren't afraid to admit they enjoy sex and who use language that isn't always granny-approved. In theory, the Georgia O'Keefe-like flowering of the genre should speak of a newfound freedom in how we think and talk about women's sexuality. There's just one problem: The movies are crap.
And more often than not, they're filled with women who worry more about what others think of them rather than less. That was true of the allegedly groundbreaking (and extremely popular) Bridesmaids. But the tendency is even more pronounced, and more egregious, in What's Your Number?, in which Anna Faris plays a twentysomething who totes up the number of guys she's slept with (19) and realizes it's nearly twice the alleged average, as reported in Marie Claire magazine. She vows that the next guy she sleeps with will be the one, and she won't have to worry about feeling slutty any longer.
As distasteful as that premise is, you could probably do something with it, and early in What's Your Number?, director Mark Mylod -- who has directed largely for television (Shameless, Entourage) and has made a handful of features like Ali G Indahouse and The Big White -- peppers us with a montage of ridiculous women's mag headlines, stuff about changing yourself to make men like you more, not that there's anything wrong with the way you are, mind you. That suggests at least a glancing awareness of the way young, single women are groomed to think there's something wrong with them if they can't attract Mr. Right. But in the end -- actually, well before the end -- What's Your Number?, instead of refuting such idiocy, plays like a movie ripped from the pages of one of those magazines: What if I've slept with too many guys? What if nobody wants me because I've slept around too much? My sister is getting married, but I'm not! Waaaaaaah!
What's Your Number? does pay feeble lip service to the double standard that it's OK for guys to sleep with anyone they want, while women must somehow maintain the illusion of purity and inexperience. But the vibrations of insecurity radiating from Faris's character, who bears the unscrupulously cute name Ally Darling, are almost too much to bear. It doesn't matter that Faris is in on the joke -- it still steamrolls over her. As the movie opens, Ally is ditching one of the guys who keep drifting into her life without committing -- this time, it's a green-obsessed biker dude played by Zachary Quinto, who rolls out of her bed and out the door with barely a shrug. This isn't what Ally wants, understandably, and it doesn't help that her older sister, Daisy (the wonderful Ari Graynor, who has a knack for being both kittenish and deadpan, though she has little to do here), is obsessed with her upcoming nuptials. The pair's uptight mom, played by Blythe Danner, hovers nearby, expressing consistent disappointment and displeasure with her younger daughter, while beaming at the older.
After a chance encounter with a formerly tubby but now slimmed-down ex, Ally becomes convinced that some of her former beaus may have improved with age. Luckily, her across-the-hall neighbor, a cutie with commitment issues of his own -- his name is Colin, and he's played by an unfettered, ridiculously appealing Chris Evans -- has the know-how to track people down out of nowhere. And so he and Ally begin riffling through her past to secure her future.
Of course you, and I, know where all this is headed from the beginning. And it's easy enough to go along with even this silly-goose premise if you're on board with Faris. She's been wonderful in movies like The House Bunny, a surprisingly progressive picture masquerading as a retrograde one, about a Playboy bunny who loses her way and ends up as house mother in a sorority house. The House Bunny was extremely sharp about the cruelty women can inflict on one another in the name of so-called sisterhood. (I'll never forget the way one sorority snob looked the cute-as-a-button Faris up and down and decreed, "You do look like an older, sluttier version of the type of girl we would want.") And in the end, no one in The House Bunny is rewarded for using stock feminine wiles; the characters get by only when they use their heads and their hearts.
Ally, on the other hand, gets by via lots of stupid-white-girl behavior, like getting drunk with her girlfriends and dancing shoeless on top of the bar, ending up in the sack with the worst person she could have chosen (namely, her ex-boss), and just generally acting like an idiot, all the while fixated on her weird plan to find the right guy. There's a fine line between a character who has a sense of humor about herself and one who's being repeatedly humiliated for entertainment value, and I'm afraid Ally falls on the wrong side of the line. Faris's timing is as good as it's ever been; it's a glorious tumble of mismatched beats that somehow work like magic. But she spends too much of the movie with her mouth hanging wide open, issuing screams of delight, or embarrassment, or "No way!" bewilderment. She's a desperate good-time girl who just wants to settle down with a nice guy, and neither Mylod nor the screenwriters (Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden, adapting Karyn Bosnak's novel 20 Times a Lady) can square those conflicting impulses, or at least acknowledge the toll they might take on a person who's looking for love and companionship.
It becomes not just tiresome but excruciating to watch Ally's desperation as she pursues ex after ex. There's the English guy (Martin Freeman) whom she apparently snared the first time around with a fake British accent; this time around, he's tipped off by her recurring Eliza Doolittleisms, which Faris probably had a great deal of fun delivering but which aren't that much fun to watch. We also see her having awkward sex, in a flashback, with a bespectacled, brace-wearing teen puppeteer played by Andy Samberg. Hilarity ought to ensue, but it doesn't.
The romantic comedy formula demands flawed characters, people who have to overcome something, anything -- shyness, shortsightedness, prejudice, hubris -- to find true love. But somehow, in the past 20 years, "feeling vaguely bad about yourself" has become an acceptably interesting flaw for a romantic comedy heroine, and it's one Faris plays right into here.
Part of the problem, maybe, is that studio executives don't want to risk making a movie where the lead character might not be, to use a word that I still refuse to accept as a real word, "relatable." And the easiest way to make a woman character relatable is to make her a pathetic handwringer with a submerged personality. When did self-pity become the catch-all, fallback position for women characters in romantic comedies? I don't know how we've come to that, but it's time to make it stop. Faris deserves better, and the men playing opposite her, like Evans, do too.