Irony lampoons the elements of romance. In Napoleon Dynamite the climactic battle is a dance; in Shaun of the Dead the hero's trusty sword is a cricket bat (a choice arrived at after various alternatives, including LPs, have been tried and discarded). The weapon stays the same throughout the picture, but the attitude shifts to decisive and disappointingly bland romance, ironic only to the extent that it's fantastic. The movie attempts a late save by making the aftermath of the horrific outbreak comic (the zombies aren't destroyed but put on chains and hired for menial work like rounding up shopping carts in parking lots), but it's too late. The movie has already shown us that its heart is in the right place and this proves fatal.

Wimbledon

The British tennis movie Wimbledon, starring Paul Bettany and Kirsten Dunst, has an even slimmer margin of irony. The weapons are tennis rackets, of course, the battles on the courts, and the hero unlikely (he's overaged for championship matches and was never driven enough to be that successful anyway). All the same it's played as a relatively straightforward romance, with ogres (the girl's father) and rival bad knights (the girl's ex-boyfriend), tutelary figures (the girl herself and the hero's father), a damsel in a tower guarded by a dragon (a barking pooch), a trusty steed (a convertible sports car), and a crisis which leads to a victory that returns vitality to the land (not only does the hero's success at Wimbledon reunite his estranged parents it rouses the entire nation). Wimbledon thus has leanings toward national epic, a fictional British counterpart to Miracle, the movie about the American hockey team's gold-medal win at the 1980 Olympics.

Dunst teases and challenges Bettany, bringing a physicality out of his recessive personality. (Dunst does for him as an actor what her character does for his as a tennis player.) But I'm not very big on this kind of romance: the substance is too thin (it doesn't tell you much about tennis) and the fantasy at once too blatantly and yet coyly masturbatory (I prefer undisguised porn). But this doesn't explain its failure with the American mass audience, which does feed on such stuff. Wimbledon probably isn't a hit here because, for starters, the hero's main rival is American, not just by nationality but by supposed national type: cocky, obnoxious, insensitive.

Worse, this is also true of Dunst as the hero's girl, a rising star on the women's circuit. On the one hand, she rejuvenates him and teaches him how to bring his game up to championship level (even if it means creaming his best friend), and thus has a tutelary function. On the other hand, she rejects him midway and throws him off his game, and thus also functions as an evil temptress (like Barbara Hershey in The Natural). She gets hers, though, and women in particular must feel they were suckered into the theater when Dunst is defeated on the courts because she had sex with the hero the night before. If the moviemakers wanted her to be the "girl" cheering from the sidelines why did they make her a tennis sensation in the first place?