admin This past Monday, Salma Hayek Pinault posted a tribute to Matthew Perry, who died over the weekend at the age of 54. “I was very moved last year when Matthew shared on his Instagram stories how much he loved ‘Fools Rush In,’ and how he thought that that film we did together was probably his best movie,” she wrote. “Throughout the years, he and I found ourselves reminiscing about that meaningful time in our lives with a deep sense of nostalgia and gratitude. My friend, you are gone much too soon, but I will continue to cherish your silliness, your perseverance, and your lovely heart.”
Most of the eulogies for Perry have focused on his performance as the nervy, sarcastic Chandler Bing in ten seasons of the megahit NBC series Friends, while acknowledging that his non-Friends work never reached those heights—in part because of his well-documented struggles with addiction and in part because Friends was such a titanic, overwhelming cultural force it could be hard to break free from its shadow.
But Pinault’s lovely remembrance centers instead on their collaboration, which was one of Perry’s notable film performances and also represents something of a road not taken for the actor. When you watch Fools Rush In, you can see a universe where Perry’s movie stardom as a rom-com leading man continued to rise.
Fools Rush In was not the only rom-com that Perry starred in, but in retrospect it’s by far the best regarded, even though at the time of its release it was seen as a disappointment by some critics. Roger Ebert, however, was a fan. “Yes, the movie is a cornball romance,” he wrote in 1997. “Yes, it manufactures a lot of standard plot twists. But there is also a level of observation and human comedy here; the movie sees how its two cultures are different and yet share so many of the same values, and in Perry and Hayek it finds a chemistry that isn’t immediately apparent.”
Watching it now, you can see that Fools Rush In maybe wasn’t the best of its genre—Jerry Maguire had come out just months earlier—but is the kind of movie you wish people today would make more often. Directed by Andy Tennant, it sticks to its formulas, but does them well, and brings an amount of insight to its culture-clash elements that is more thoughtful than one would necessarily expect for the mid-90s.
