Where Have All the Cary Grants Gone?

Pity poor Uma Thurman. In My Super Ex-Girlfriend, her new movie, she plays a superhero who falls for Luke Wilson, a not very successful architect. He does not reciprocate, a less than shrewd response to a woman who, with one glance, can set you alight--and I don't mean with desire. In her last romantic comedy, Prime, she played a high-powered fashion consultant who's dating a man who worked as a kitchen hand and moved into her apartment and played a lot of video games. Those are the men Uma Thurman gets. Or doesn't.

But she's not alone. In this summer's The Break-Up, Jennifer Aniston lives with an overweight and slobby tour guide, while in Failure to Launch, Sarah Jessica Parker woos a man who dwells with his parents. Those guys would have bonded well with the lads from last year's Wedding Crashers, who sneak into other people's nuptials because they have no life, or with that 40 Year-Old Virgin fella. Or, for that matter, the gentlemen from Hitch or Fever Pitch or Along Came Polly or almost any other recent movie in the opening scenes of which boy and girl meet cute. They are, all of them, spectacular weenies.

The shift in power between the sexes has nowhere been greater than in romantic comedies. The men are about as useful as a pitcher of spit, while the women have careers and well-furnished apartments and vast freighters of wisdom. In Julianne Moore's next movie, Trust the Man, she plays a successful actress, while her husband has no remunerative employment. How does her real-life husband feel about being portrayed that way? You can ask him. He wrote the movie.

What's with the rash of wussy love interests? Why all the "unsuccessful architects" (movie shorthand for men who cannot, so to speak, get things up)? Is this the great revolution wrought by the ascent of women to the heads of studios? Is it because guys with real jobs and some sense of purpose, let alone captains of industry, simply aren't funny? ("Ladies and gentlemen, the adorable antics of Ben Bernanke!") Is it just another attack from liberal Hollywood, constantly harping about the buffoon who keeps messing things up and his smart, attractive Right-Hand Woman who has to set it to rights?

Most of the men in these movies are under 40. Could it be that a generation raised by women who worked at paying jobs before pulling a second shift as homemakers simply find any situation in which women are not heroically gifted and energetic to be too much of a suspension of disbelief?

We know what the schlub love interests are not. They are not a female fantasy. Given Uma-like superpowers or even Condi-like earthly powers, women would not, surely, choose to waste them on bringing numskulls who look like Ben Stiller up to I'm-prepared-to-be-seen-out-with-you standard. Women need their superpowers for more important stuff like fighting illiteracy and deflecting people's attention away from the fact they've gone maybe one day too long without shaving their legs.