The Proposal

In Anne Fletcher’s 2009 comedy, Alaska is played by Massachusetts. The town you see as Sitka is Rockport, partly rebuilt to resemble it; shooting began there on 2 April 2008, moved to Manchester-by-the-Sea after 22 April, then Boston and Manhattan. That water is the Atlantic, so the remoteness the plot needs comes from set dressing, not geography. Every service job in town belongs to one man: Oscar Nuñez plays Ramone as waiter, shopkeeper, stripper and minister at once. That is the film’s whole idea of Sitka, and how it acclimatises its city woman. Peter Chiarelli wrote the script in 2005. Julia Roberts passed; Sandra Bullock signed in May 2007, Ryan Reynolds about two months later. The scene where the two collide naked took several days, and Bullock has described the producers’ fig leaves falling off. For a romantic comedy it carries 350 effects shots. It opened on 19 June 2009 in 3,056 theatres, took over 34 million dollars that weekend and 317 million worldwide on a 40 million budget. A good fit if you find it charming that every service in Sitka lands on Ramone, so the town reads as a set rather than a place. Less so if you want the far north to come from an actual far north, since this Alaska is a repainted New England port.