Given that my last two posts have been about a guy I accuse of genocide and a guy who collaborates with Nazis and then tries to kill someone else in order to hide that fact, I’ll grant that it’s a little cheeky of me to put Jules from “the movie where people casually sing ‘I Say a Little Prayer for You’ at lunch” above them. My only real rejoinder is that Jules represents a scenario that far more of us can face up to. God willing, most of us will not be in a position to shoot down the last members of a race, or will not be trapped in a Nazi prison camp. (I know.) Jules has that personality that I think many of us can see in ourselves if we’re honest about what’s under the microscope. Covetousness abounds in her, and worse than covetousness, the rationalization thereof, and worse than the rationalization, the indulgence of the fantasy of rationalization.

There’s definitely something off about Michael and Kimmy’s relationship. I don’t think any of us look at that relationship between the twenty-eight year old guy and the fabulously wealthy college student and say, “Yep, sign my daughter up for that.” It is the movie’s form of plausible deniability, the only thing that can make it anything like a romcom as opposed to one of those famed ’90s psychological thrillers. But just as obviously as Michael is a creep sent forward in time from the 1880s to ensure that any woman over twenty-one is an old maid, it’s just as obvious that it’s not Jules’ business to say anything more than “You don’t think it’s weird that she won’t be able to drink that champagne toast at her own wedding?” There’s something off about Michael and Julianne’s relationship too, though, or at least something wrong about the way that she sees it. They’ve seen each other through everything, she says, and yet she is utterly blindsided by the news that Michael is getting married. Seeing him, and seeing her, sparks that sense that she deserves something someone else has. Not someone, which matters, but something. George, the ghettoized gay best friend, at least sort of tries to convince Jules that she’s doing something nuts in the name of this covetousness. The accurate phrase “psychotic jealousy” pops up, even if it’s said through a friendly simper.

Jules propels herself forward in a chariot driven by two wild horses tormented by a host of bloodsucking flies. One of those horses is the belief that she is in love with Michael, which is not a belief that she seems to have credited much over the previous decade knowing the guy. This horse is moving pretty fast, but in a straight path. The other horse is making the chariot list and pitch more like a small boat in the open ocean than a chariot on a dirt track, and that horse, its eyes twitching and sounding a lot like Pazuzu, argues that because Julianne wants Michael she has a right to him. This is a colossal conceitedness. It would sound crazy if you tried to convince the person at the self-checkout that you have a right to that bag of chips by the scanner because you want it badly enough. It sounds evil if you apply that logic to a human being.

This story ends happily enough, I think, although it requires a true romcom ordeal in order to achieve that happy ending. There is justice as the episode of psychotic jealousy fades and all the adults in this movie get to make adult choices about their adult lives, no matter how young those adults might be. Perhaps there would have been more justice if Kimmy got to smack Jules with a baseball bat a few times.