I recently watched the movie “The Proposal” (2009) for the first time with my husband. You know, when you start watching some chick flick and the next thing you know your husband is curled up with you, equally amused and invested? This was one of those moments.
Where do I start? Let’s be honest, I LOVE rom coms, Sandra Bullock, and Ryan Reynolds. So you can take my review with a grain of salt.
The movie begins with a very stereotypical, Devil Wears Prada #girlboss moment. Sandra Bullock as Margaret is beautifully bitchy while she parades around a bustling office, intimidating her staff.
Her assistant, Andrew (Ryan Reynolds) is clearly the one keeping the place running, from getting her coffee to doing the hard work of firing good people for no good reason. He is sweet, genuine, and too afraid to say no to Margaret… Which she exploits often but in a pivotal moment, with the looming threat of deportation to Canada, she makes him a proposal he can’t refuse: marry her, or lose his job and his entire reputation.
Andrew agrees reluctantly, but only if he is allowed to go on a vacation he’s been planning for years. Not to lose her best employee and only chance of keeping her job, Margaret flies with Andrew to rural Alaska to meet his eccentric family and what follows is a nightmare…. And a romance you totally didn’t see coming from the beginning 😉 Gotta have that rom-com predictability.
Bullock and Reynolds have a solid amount of chemistry onscreen, and Bullock does a wonderful job of playing the stereotypical “just pretending to be a bitch” character while Reynolds is… Well, Ryan Reynolds.
Interspersed throughout the predictable plot there are a lot of witty dialogues and one-liners from nearly the entire cast.
There is a scene in which Margaret stumbles onto Grandma (Betty White) dancing and chanting in the woods dressed in (presumably) Native Alaskan clothing & a headdress, so I’m knocking a point off my rating for that. Even if were written into the script that Grandma is part Native (doubtful) and even if the clothing looked more… Legitimate? I would still find the scene to be appropriative and in very poor taste.
Thinking further on this, I don’t remember any Native characters at all. I do remember one token non-white character: Ramone, an exotic dancer/jack of all trades played by Oscar Nuñez.
Native voices, I’ll defer to you on that one if you feel differently.
I won’t spoil the twist… If you watch/ed this, let me know if you predicted the twist in my comments.
Ultimately, The Proposal was a cute, pretty predictable movie with some genuinely hilarious moments. Headdress scene aside, I would rate this movie a 6/10 for predictability and absurdly over the top humor. Taking into account the appropriation, I’ll bring it down to a 4 or 5.
Have you watched The Proposal? What were your thoughts?
The Midnight Review 