Some People Arrive After You Have Already Learned How to Be Alone
Frankie has a television, a small apartment, a job she returns to every day, and a life that looks fairly organised. Not necessarily happy. Organised. Sometimes that is enough.
There are periods when you stop expecting very much. You know what to buy at the supermarket, what to put on when you get home, what time you go to bed. Slowly, routine starts to resemble peace. Then somebody appears.
In Garry Marshall’s 1991 film Frankie and Johnny, that somebody is Johnny, a cook recently released from prison who gets a job at the same New York café where Frankie waits tables. Johnny meets Frankie and decides very quickly that he wants to be with her. Frankie decides very quickly that she does not.
That is where the problem begins. Curiously, it is also where the film becomes most interesting.
Johnny looks as if he is beginning; Frankie looks as if she has finished
There is a huge difference between wanting to meet someone and being found by someone when you were not looking. Johnny leaves prison with an almost absurd appetite for starting again. He gets a job. He cooks. He talks. He flirts. He gets excited.
Frankie lives somewhere else emotionally. She works. She goes home. She looks out the window. She keeps a certain distance between herself and everybody around her. Michelle Pfeiffer plays a woman who does not need to look miserable every second for us to understand that something in her closed a long time ago.
Johnny, meanwhile, asks questions, pushes, talks about the future and turns small coincidences into evidence that they should be together. Even their names help him: Frankie and Johnny. To him, that means something. To her, it may only mean that two people happen to have names.
But some of this feels different now
Watching a romantic comedy decades after it was released produces a peculiar effect: things the film expects us to accept as romantic no longer pass so easily. Johnny is persistent. Very persistent. Frankie rejects him several times and he keeps trying. People around her join in, nudging her to open up, meet somebody, give him a chance.
That complicates a question that probably felt much simpler in 1991. Are we watching a man help a woman trust again? Or are we watching a woman whom nobody leaves alone until she eventually says yes? The film clearly wants us closer to the first reading. The second never quite disappears.
Because Frankie actually wants things
Love stories sometimes confuse being alone with waiting for someone to arrive. They are not the same thing.
Frankie is afraid of becoming involved again, and the film gradually reveals why intimacy means more to her than warmth and companionship. But reducing all of that to ‘deep down she wanted to fall in love’ would be too easy.
There are moments when Frankie seems to want exactly what she says she wants: space, time, for Johnny to stop pushing. That makes the film unexpectedly alive today.
You can like someone and still not be ready for what they want from you. You can laugh with someone, sleep with them, enjoy a night together and still not want to build a life with them. Johnny has trouble separating those things. For him, connection means movement. Frankie needs to stop.
The film works best when they stop trying to be a couple
The loveliest scenes in Frankie and Johnny do not need much romantic machinery. They are conversations. Two people in a kitchen. A walk. A silence that lasts a little too long. Something uncomfortable that one of them finally admits.
Part of that comes from the stage play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, which was far smaller: two people, essentially one room, and a long conversation after they spend the night together. Terrence McNally opened the story up for the film, adding the café, coworkers, neighbours and a larger world.
That change created another tension. The original Frankie and Johnny were ordinary people. The film gave us Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino. Hollywood being Hollywood.
And still, something survives
Frankie does not want to be rescued. Johnny does not have much with which to rescue anyone. He has no money, no impressive career, no settled life. He has just left prison. He works over a grill. His relationships have failed. He is lonely. What he seems to have in abundance is hope. Frankie has very little of it.
Maybe that is why they recognise something in each other. Not because they are soulmates, but because they arrive at the same relationship from completely different places. One thinks: why not try? The other thinks: why should I?
There is something odd about the way we talk about being single
The people around Frankie seem to treat her single life as a problem waiting to be solved. We know the script: ‘Are you seeing anyone?’, ‘You have to give yourself a chance’, ‘Someone will come along.’ Even people who are perfectly happy alone sometimes hear these lines as if they have reported a symptom.
There is a line between helping someone move beyond fear and deciding that we know what they need better than they do. Johnny crosses that line more than once.
The film draws us back toward him because it also shows us his loneliness, his failures and his almost desperate need to believe that something good can still begin. That does not automatically make his persistence romantic. It does keep him from being only a man who refuses to listen.
There is no enormous solution at the end
No airport. No wedding. No sprint through the rain. Just two people trying to believe they might stay a little longer.
I would hesitate to call Frankie and Johnny a ‘realistic’ love story today without adding a few sentences afterwards. Too much about its courtship is harder to ignore now. That may be exactly why the film is still interesting.
It begins as a story about getting someone to fall in love again and leaves us with a more complicated question: when someone has learned to live behind a closed door, how do you know whether to knock again? And at what point does knocking again simply mean you did not listen to the first answer?
