The Cinema of the Four

Definitely, Maybe

It may be recalled that my great-grandfather, Sherlock Holmes, undertook many a case that involved no criminal act. There was just a mystery to be solved, some bit of someone’s otherwise ordinary life that did not fit the normal patterns. And after the genre of “romantic comedy” has been filled to the brim with movies following normal patterns, we now come to something not so ordinary, a “romantic mystery” called “Definitely, Maybe.”

The premise is fairly basic, a father (played by the ever-likable Ryan Reynolds) tells his young daughter (played by the likewise likable Abigail Breslin) the story of his early love life with all the names of his past loves changed. She then will try to guess which of the past loves became her mother.

What sets this movie apart from the typical modern tale of light romance is that none of the father’s past loves is a bad choice. Most romantic comedies go by a strict pattern: hero or heroine betrothed to the bad choice, a character so flawed that it’s hard to see how they ever dated them, then meeting their one true love. “Definitely, Maybe” does telegraph some punches, but one has the distinct feeling that any of the old girlfriends would have made a fine wife and mother. In fact, even though the movie tells us early that there’s a divorce in the works, the rest of the film makes one wonder why. Everyone is just so pleasant.

And that is perhaps what makes “Definitely, Maybe” feel so distinctly modern. In an age where patterns of divorce-remarry-divorce-remarry make any reasonable person question the old fairy tale version of true love, the film accepts that one person might have many loves in their lifetime. An observant movie detective will therefore look for not one solution to the mystery of “Definitely, Maybe,” but two.

The good Watson the fourth commented that this film also had perhaps the truest depiction of life in New York City of any modern romance set there, not being all Times Square and Central Park – which says much of the rest of the film as well. Sometimes Watson is a very observant fellow.

What Great Grand-father Sherlock might have said:
“We have certainly been favoured with extraordinary luck during this inquiry.”