The Sweetest Thing Wasn't As Sweet As I Thought it Was Going To Be

The Sweetest Thing is a movie from 2002 starring Cameron Diaz as Christina Walters, a young woman in the dating world who is often careless of the hearts she is breaking. One night while out at a bar with her two friends Courtney (Christina Applegate) and Jane (Selma Blair), she runs into Peter (Thomas Jane), a young man at a bachelor party who seemingly changes Christina’s entire perspective on love and commitment. In an attempt to win the guy, Christina and Courtney embark on a road trip to run into Peter at his brother’s wedding. The road trip is filled with hilarious twists and turns that land the girls in situations they have never been in before. Through the experience, they learn more about themselves and what they want from the future.

Here’s the thing about this movie, it doesn’t do a great job doing anything. The story doesn’t make much sense and everything begins to happen very quickly. We see this woman that we are told is a player and a heartbreaker, but we don’t see much of her living that lifestyle. She spends most of the movie love sick over a man she spoke to for half a minute in a club and we don’t see her interact with any men beyond the one she is falling head over heels for.

The friendship between the girls is also interesting. Not that they don’t have a good friendship, but the beginning of the movie kind of sells Courtney, Jane, and Christina as three friends who hang out together a lot. Jane has been recently dumped and they’re trying to make her feel better when we first see the three together. Then they go to the club and Jane meets a new man; Jane’s character is kind of the opposite of Christina in the way that she falls in love very quickly with the wrong kind of men. Quickly, Jane’s character becomes more of a side character, or a comic relief character. She doesn’t go on the road trip with the other girls and the story switches between Courtney and Christina on the road trip and the shenanigans Jane is getting into with her new boyfriend back home. Jane’s part of the story is not nearly as interesting as the main story, nor is it funny enough to contribute much more than some awkward moments and screen time for Selma Blair. It begs the viewer to wonder why Jane isn’t a part of the girl gang, why is she the outsider? Perhaps it is to show the difference between her trusting and committed nature compared to Christina and Courtney who both have problems with those two qualities, but Jane’s relationship does not feel like a romance or a committed relationship either. In fact, it feels like just sex with some weird guy she met at the club. I do not understand what the point of her character was and it feels like they wasted Selma Blair’s presence in this movie by not including her character in the road trip.

There is a lot about this movie that I believe is a little problematic as well. I believe the movie portrays women as incredibly shallow based on the main female characters in the movie. There is not a single woman in this movie who seems real. For example, the night after meeting Peter, Christina has a dream about him. This dream is the catalyst for a majority of her major romantic feelings for Peter. In the dream, they are in bed together. He is beneath the blankets pleasuring her, then stops and tells her how amazing and beautiful she is. Then the doorbell rings and he says “I called room service for us”. Then enters room service with a gigantic bowl of chocolate ice cream. Christina eyes the ice cream and Peters says “I went ahead and took the calories out for you”. This is very telling of the time the movie was made and what people thought women were worried about back in 2002. Watching the movie over 10 years later, women’s priorities have changed immensely and it was off-putting to watch a movie that is so blatantly dated. When watching movies, I try not to blame the time it was made on some of the content of the movie, but it just felt like men wrote this movie about women not understanding the complexities and dynamic friendships women have (upon a quick Google search, I have discovered that the movie was written by Nancy Pimental, so there’s really no excuse for that). This movie feels like a movie advertised to women but meant to be enjoyed by men. It is incredibly easy to make fun of the female characters, because everything they are doing in the movie feels stupid and meaningless. There are a lot of sexual jokes and very little romance to the movie at all. There are most certainly women out there that have seen this movie and enjoyed it, whether it’s because of the iconic actresses cast in the leads or because the movie does have some funny moments. Overall the movie fell flat for me. There are better female led films that have better messages to send than the overall message I got from watching The Sweetest Thing.

While the movie has its set of problems, it is incredibly entertaining to watch. Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, and Selma Blair were all hilarious and at their best in the movie. If you don’t take the movie too seriously, it is a funny and entertaining movie that fits in well with other popular comedy films like Dumb and Dumber and Shallow Hal. It’s a movie that is probably not very good, but holds a special place in a lot of people’s hearts because of nostalgia for the early 2000’s and the kind of humor we don’t see often from movies in 2023.