Carrie Bradshaw Needs to Grow Up

Image by IKEA Boy ♂【J.D Chen】™ via Flickr

I don’t know why I’m so looking forward to Sex and the City 2. Maybe it has something to do with the fabulous trailer. Although I adored the series — and the way it sometimes beautifully incorporated music, from Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” to DB Boulevard’s “Point of View,” into its final frames — the first movie was kind of a bust. There was too little sex, too little city, and for a romantic comedy, it was light on the comedy and completely lacking romance.

But my biggest problem with both Sex and the City the series and the movie comes down to our It girl herself: Carrie Bradshaw. Not to knock Sarah Jessica Parker, a good actress who played her to perfection, but I always found Carrie to be strangely unlikeable. At times, she was hard to root for and, occasionally, borderline intolerable (particularly when she was taking Aidan for granted, going on about scrunchies or taking a “lovah,” in the form of creepy, charisma-free Aleksandr Petrovsky).

Think about it: Over the course of the series, all of her best friends evolved in significant ways. Samantha, the middle-aged gal with a teenage boy’s (or a gay man’s) libido, was finally able to commit to a long-term relationship. And in the movie, unlike so many of us, she knew when it had reached its expiration date and cleanly cut the cord. That lady don’t play!

Neither does Miranda, always my personal favorite, the quintessential modern, career woman. She found space in her life for both a baby and a husband and didn’t lose her identity in the process. And anyone who would make the drastic move from Manhattan to Brooklyn for the sake of family, scores major brownie points from me.

And then there is Charlotte, the Pollyanna who so drove me up the wall. She continued to do so at the end of the series and in the movie, but I’ve got to hand it to her for giving up her pursuit of Mr. Perfect and being able to look past a bald, pudgy exterior and recognize when she had found Mr. Right. The scene where she begs Harry’s forgiveness at the Jewish mixer just before he proposes to her is still one of my all-time favorites in the entire series and Kristin Davis’s best work.

But poor Carrie. By the series finale, she had come full circle. She ended up where she started: with Big. In itself, this is not such a bad thing. We all backtrack in our romantic lives from time to time. Carrie had terrible taste in men, and I always thought Big was the only one who was right for her. But our girl’s big problem (no pun intended) is that rather than accepting him for who he is, warts, lack of sensitivity and all, she repeatedly tried to fix him, to make him into her idea of the perfect guy.

In the movie, he was still mid-Peter Pan syndrome, pulling insensitive stunts, and she was still playing Miss Fix It. So he got cold feet right before the I do’s. He wouldn’t be Big if he didn’t. But he came around. Rather than listening to what he had to say, she ran off and stuck her head in the sand — on the beaches of Mexico (not a terrible setting to recuperate from a bad romance).

In the end, she and Big had the simple wedding that they both wanted, not the lavish one that Modern Bride once deemed mandatory. And I suppose that is a minor triumph of character. But on May 28, when Sex and the City 2 opens, it would be nice to see Carrie put away the tool box once and for all and accept her 50ish groom as is. Of course, we know this won’t happen — what would become of the as-certain-as-death-and-taxes Sex and the City 3?

Let’s just hope they throw a little more romance, a lot more sex, a few good tunes and some decent jokes into the mix.