A Novel Romance (2015)

(On TV, June 2021) The two reasons why I make a point to watch movies featuring novelists are mutually contradictory. As someone who has written novels and counts several novelists as friends, I can identify with those characters, and novelists—for some strange reason—seem far more prevalent than IT professionals in cinema. The other, arguably better reason why I’m interested in films featuring novelists is the sometimes-ludicrous dramatization of the craft. In movies, novelists scarcely spend any time writing; they’re hounded by editors so that their book can appear the next month (something screamingly hilarious if you know all about publishing delays), live the high life at publicity cocktails, agonize over writer’s block as if it was the most important thing ever experienced, and can’t write a thing unless they’ve personally lived it. NONE OF THIS is even remotely true… but it makes for good fiction and the lousier the film, the more these ancillary aspects to the writer’s life (which is really about interminable hours typing, procrastinating and staring off into space) take over and present a deliciously demented misconception of what it is to be a novelist. (Don’t think this is accidental — most scripts are penned by writers who know perfectly well what the craft is about.) This long-winded introduction is more than A Novel Romance deserves — as a Hallmark Channel romantic comedy, it’s clearly not interested in a single whiff of authenticity. It features novelists as romantic creatures and natural enemies of critics, which makes it inevitable that a romance would bloom between the protagonist and his fiercest reviewer. Never mind that the identity of a romance writer is here supposed to be a big secret rather than a commercial conceit. If it wasn’t for the innocuousness of the genre and an understanding that none of this is meant to be real (such as googling “Sophia Portland” and expecting a useful result), the entire thing would feel slightly psychopathic with the male character pretending to be someone else… but this is a hunk doing outlandish things in a female-centred romance so everything is forgiven. The script is merely serviceable even by the Hallmark standards, complete with another one of those weird time-skips meant to expedite the conclusion. By wider cinematic standards, this is terrible. By Hallmark standards, it remains worse than average, with an unremarkable lead (Amy Acker, bland), standard tropes and unconvincing details. Even by my own the-wilder-the-better assessment of over-dramatic movies about novelists, A Novel Romance is a dud: nothing worth getting angry about, but still not particularly enjoyable.