Quick Review: Leap Year

I can't wait until same-sex marriage becomes commonplace nationwide. Why? Besides the obvious reasons, it's so that maybe we'll see the gay equivalent of movies like "Leap Year," in which Anna (Amy Adams), a woman with her own successful career and a four-year relationship with a seemingly good man goes nuts when an anticipated marriage proposal doesn't happen. Yes, goes nuts. How else to explain why such a woman would, on a moment's notice, fly off to Dublin (where her boyfriend is conveniently at a conference) to ask him to marry her, because her father (John Lithgow, in little more than a cameo) told her about an old legend that every February 29th in Ireland a woman can propose and the man can't refuse? I mean, we're now in the year 2010. From what I've heard, there's nothing to stop anyone of either gender from proposing to their beloved at any time. Unless, of course, both are of the same sex.

Anyhoo, Anna's flight is diverted by bad weather to Wales. She hires a boat to take her to Cork, but the boat is also affected by the storm and she ends up well off-course and needing a ride to get to Dublin before Leap Day. Declan, an Irish innkeeper in need of money (Matthew Goode), agrees to take her. There's a whole series of misadventures; they bicker the entire way but...well, you see where this is going. It's hard not to like Amy Adams, and Matthew Goode lives up to his surname, so to an extent you can understand why Declan and Anna would eventually start falling for each other. But Anna's so nuts because of the whole proposal thing, at some point any sane man would have left her on the side of a road somewhere. And Declan's continuing jabs at Anna ought to have driven her to find an alternate route. Then again, if people in these movies acted sensibly, the films would be really short. My grade: C.