HOW NOT TO WRITE: Falling INN Love

Gilbert the Goat

Falling INN Love. Get it? There’s an INN, and the protagonists are falling IN love while they fix up the INN. It’s an INN they’re falling IN love IN. Get it?

Okay. Goofy pun aside (and apart from repeatedly explaining to my girlfriend why Gabriela should be a softball/Home Depot lesbian caught in a warring BnB plot with Charlotte and end up with Shelley), this is actually a decent movie. I had low expectations based on the title as well as Netflix’s general ridiculousness in picking up terrible romcoms and limited series that are maybe the worst written nonsense in existence.

Falling INN Love (get it?) is about Gabriella Diaz, whose life falls entirely apart in the span of a day. She loses her job due to the company collapsing, and then she realizes her boyfriend has no intention of committing to her at all (doesn’t hurt that he’s also bossy and annoying). So she enters a contest to win an inn in New Zealand. She wins! And she goes to New Zealand to check it out. Apparently, it needs a lot of work, and she’s as stubborn as the goat that lives on the property, so she decides to stay and fix the place up to sell.

Unlike The Princess Switch and The Xmas Prince (and sequels), the male lead isn’t a vaguely symmetrical piece of cardboard. Jake is kind of cute. He has a life, as a contractor who keeps bees (I assume as a hobby?). He’s funny, not aggressive or arrogant, and while he butts heads with our protagonist Gabriella at times, he isn’t negging her on purpose. Ye gods, if I have to see one more dumbass male lead being written as “edgy” when he’s really just a dick.

Anyway, moving on, I really enjoyed the side characters. The setting of a small town in New Zealand doesn’t sound like much on the outset, but everyone is so nice, and they all have their own thing going on. Way better than the endless string of fake European countries that seem to have ten residents. I even ended up liking the Bitch character Charlotte, because she has really clear motivations, and she was never really that mean. Her goals just conflicted with our protagonist’s goals, and she made some poor choices.

Furthermore, and this part struck me, I don’t remember the last time I watched a romcom and was genuinely laughing, not AT the film, but in response to JOKES. I suppose that reveals me to be the black-hearted creature I truly am, but most romcoms in movie style are not that funny. They rely on cringe humor and half-assed “sassiness” in their characters. For Falling INN Love (get it?), the characters have their quirks, but not in a way that feels stereotypical or forced, and Gilbert? He’s the real star.

All and all, Falling INN Love (get it? Okay, I’ll stop, I swear.) is sweet, actually romantic, funny, and very rewatchable. Honestly, for improvement, I have only a few suggestions on what might make it better.

TL;DR- HOW NOT TO WRITE

Unlike most of the movies in this genre, the heroine actually has a pretty good reason to leave her home, boyfriend, and job (although technically her company collapsed). Thus, the audience is not being asked to suspend their disbelief too far on this point. At most, the stretch comes from the amount of money it would cost to renovate this house. So, plot-wise we’re only looking at certain tension and pacing improvements.

By the middle of the movie, when Gabriella and Jake are actively working on the inn and we get numerous moments of them arguing about how much of the old structure to keep vs how much modernization is needed, their chemistry and the fun of the movie really hits its stride. Unfortunately, it takes us a bit to get there, and their relationship before this point felt a bit off.

• Don’t skimp on setting up plot beats.

The only actual flaw I see in the movie itself is that from Gabriella’s first “meet cute” with Jake, she is inexplicably antagonistic with him. We don’t see her being antagonistic with her dick coworkers, or with her boyfriend. She’s actually very appeasing in nature, and it works to her benefit with the townspeople of Beachwood Downs.

It really seems as though she and Jake are at odds in this part because they are supposed to be at this part of the story. The structure of this romance doesn’t follow early heat slam-bam plot, but the romcom overcoming differences. This means that, while we probably expect them to have a problem with each other at first, it does need to be set up properly.

I would argue that the first part of the movie, during which we set up Gabriella’s character, she should be more formidable with her coworkers rather than letting them walk over her and during the fight with her boyfriend, he call her a stubborn control freak. Either he should in irritation, or her friend should in a loving way. We need some grounding for this layer of her character. Otherwise, it seems like her personality flips the minute she sees Jake.

Again, Jake is a pretty nice guy. Not a Nice Guy. He’s just helpful and only teases her a little when she knocks things over and makes a mess. We need more of a reason for her to be so combative every time she sees him, since (refreshingly) he hasn’t done anything to make her angry. He does run into her suitcase with his car, but that was as much her fault as his.  A little work in setting up their early dynamic would iron out this kink.

• Don’t forget to let the narrative breathe.

As Sherry Thomas (Author of The Lady Sherlock series, The Magnolia Sword, etc.) pointed out during her 2019 RWA panel on pacing, it really only has to be “good enough.” The opening needs to be good enough to get us to the rising action, the middle has to move us to the, and the ending has to bring things together. (I’m paraphrasing a lot. Go see her talk.) A lot of authors obsess over their openings because they know that editors are going to toss their manuscript out of the pile for arbitrary reasons and conflicting advice. So it makes sense to fret about the pacing.

Falling INN Love’s pacing is good enough. It works as a movie. However, to make this story optimal, I would have advised that Netflix invest in this project as a limited series. Unlike some of Neflix’s other limited series, Falling INN Love  has a well-established cast of characters, running jokes, a clear through-line for its main arc, as well as subplots that could be explored throughout a series of maybe 6-8 episodes. You have our main couple, a side couple with Shelley and her admirer, Charlotte’s shenanigans, the gay couple that run the café, and of course, Gilbert.

I can easily see this running for a season and being rather popular. I don’t know that they had the money, but with such a well done setting and cast, Netflix could EVEN have done one of its favorite things: Had a two season show. Except, you know, planned it from the start so people don’t attack them on Twitter.

The main reason to expand a narrative like this, even though I think the movie did a good enough job for its format, is a principle that sometimes gets overlooked in fiction: Letting the narrative breathe. If After failed becausse it is almost nothing but interstitial moments, Falling INN Love thrives because it uses them to build cause and effect style on one another until we reach our conclusion. Drawing from that strength, it could easily shift from a movie to a short series allow for that narrative breathing, that careful building of character interactions. 

Even if you aren't writing something that has a lot of connective tissue, the scenes still need to have a sense of cause and effect. Don't let things happen just because they have to happen at this point in your script/manuscript.

But that's just my take. Anyway, mostly enjoyed this one. As always, if you have suggestions something you'd like me to try to "fix" with my overly opinionated ranting, drop me a line. See you next time, cuttlefishes.