In the movies' `Roberts formula,' money can buy love | Roger Ebert

She arrives for the job interview in a red miniskirt, and claims she had some experience in her younger years as a Candy-Striper. He looks at the miniskirt, decides she has experience aplenty, and offers her the job: Room and board and $400 a week, in return for supporting him through the horrors of chemotherapy. Of course he is not really looking for a nurse. He's looking for love, and fears he may not have long to find it.

This set-up leads to the archetypal scene in most Julia Roberts movies, all versions of "Pygmalion," in which she plays an uneducated working-class woman who is swept off her feet by a rich man of a higher social class. When she caves in and starts to love the guy, and he can stop writing the checks. Only one variation is permitted, in which she drops the rich creep and starts to love a regular guy who has turned up in her life. The Roberts Formula seems so established, it's almost as obligatory as the formula used in many of the movies by the number one male star, Tom Cruise (the neophyte, the mentor, the older woman, the craft, the arena, etc.). Consider the Julia Roberts filmography:

* "Mystic Pizza" (1988). Roberts plays Daisy Araujo, a young woman of working-class Portuguese ancestry, who works in a pizzeria near a coastal resort of the rich and famous. A rich kid named Charles Gordon Winsor Jr. walks into her life and sweeps her off her feet, and at first she is impressed, although eventually he stages an embarrassing scene in front of the snobs in his family, and she drops him.

* "Pretty Woman" (1990). Roberts plays Vivian Ward, a hooker on Hollywood Boulevard who is picked up by a rich businessman (Richard Gere). He is not interested in sex. Neither is she, for that matter, but she charges him for his time, and stays on the payroll until they fall genuinely in love, and he can stop writing the checks. Meanwhile, he explains the investment business to her.

* "Sleeping with the Enemy" (1991). Roberts plays a young woman named Sara, who has married a rich creep (Patrick Bergin) who considers her a possession, like his house and his car. He bought her, and she's his--as a partner in his sick scenarios in which love and tenderness are alternated with savage beatings. Eventually she runs away, takes another identity, and falls in love with the nice guy next door (Kevin Anderson).

* And now comes "Dying Young," in which she eventually falls in love with the rich kid and he can stop writing the checks. Her home-study subject this time is art history. "Dying Young" does have an aborted version of the nice kid next door. He's a working-class guy in the Northern California coastal town the young couple hides out in. He's warm and understanding, and there are scenes in the movie suggesting that Roberts, worn down by the demands of her self-centered lover, might find consolation with him. But in the end she stays with the original version of the story formula.