Twenty Days in the Life: ONE DAY

You pick your friends, or so the saying goes, but that’s not entirely true, is it? Circumstance, coincidence and closeness play a role in friendship as well so that it’s quite possible you can look back upon a time in your life and discover that you were drawn into a friendship that you didn’t value until that person was already gone. Such is the story of Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess), two acquaintances who become sort-of-friends only to circle around each other, flitting in and out of the other’s life, for the better part of twenty years, flirting, toying, yearning all the while to become more than friends.

We first encounter the two of them thrown together on the night of their graduation from Edinburgh University in 1988. They’re in a group of drunken revelers who stumble through town, but slowly, two by two, the graduates peel off from the main group. Emma and Dexter end up spending time together and then parting ways. Through the rest of One Day, we will check in on these two characters every July 15th for two decades. Sometimes they are together. Other times, the day passes without them even thinking of one another. This is ostensibly a romance, presented with a shameless gimmick, but it’s presented in such a low-key, casually unimportant way that the artifice of it all is hidden beneath the dullness.

By giving us only one day per year, the little snippets of passing time accumulate slowly into a big picture, but there’s also a lot of exposition that must be shoved into what little time we have to spend with these people each year. Emma struggles in her twenties, but then finds some professional success. Dexter finds near-immediate professional success, but he’s just as lost as Emma in his twenties, the sense of floundering aimlessly only growing as he finds early success slipping away. There are two full human lives on display for us to watch but we get only glimpses, leaving the impression that the better story is often unfolding on the days we are not privy to.

I found myself wondering if the film would be better, more powerful and emotional, if we got to see more of these characters. Hathaway and Sturgess do fine, intimately textured work, but there’s a sense of the whole production struggling under the weight (or rather, lack thereof) of so much thinness. I got a sense that the actors know more about who these characters are then the film allows them to express. Even supporting characters like Dexter’s mother, played by the reliable Patricia Clarkson, seem to fade away, taking potential for deepening the film’s texture with them. Adapted by David Nicholls from his own bestselling novel, unread by me, this is a prime example of a concept that I’d imagine could work better with the nuance and detail capable in text. Filmed, there’s far too much telling instead of showing.

As it plods forward, the plot of One Day seems to stretch thinner and thinner. Director Lone Scherfig, of the well-acted and Oscar-nominated An Education from a couple of years ago, coaches some decent acting but has a rather perfunctory visual style here and a flatness of pace that works to dull the emotions. The years stamp onto the screen with each passing day, allowing me all too much time to contemplate just how much longer I’d be sitting in the theater, struggling to get on the film’s wavelength. Late in the film, when one character suddenly dies, I found myself profoundly unmoved. But then, in the final stretch, the plot folds over upon itself and gains some shallow depth that is faintly effective and affecting. By then, though, it was too little too late.

It's Not a Romance / It's Totally a Romance: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

Friends with Benefits is a self-loathing romantic comedy, all too ready to hit all the required beats of the genre while almost all the while protesting every one of them. It stars a relaxed, lovable Mila Kunis and a tense, confident Justin Timberlake as young urban professionals and new friends who decide to skip dating and go straight for the bedroom. It’s not that they don’t like each other, far from it. They’re totally in love. They just pretend that what they’re having isn’t a relationship. It’s only casual because that’s what they tell themselves, much like the movie is only not a romantic comedy because it pretends not to notice its own boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl structure.

As the plot creaks through its predictable paces, it finds some occasional patches of effective humor and a few spots of legitimately button-pushing edginess. At times it is capable of living up to its potential frankness, though it often scurries away or buries its insight in juvenile giggling. But as the superficial daring of the film wears thin, I found myself asking why this film is so concerned with not coming off as a romantic comedy. After all, if it managed a few more laughs and a sweeter payoff, it could actually be a good rom-com, a rare feat these days. To paraphrase Godard, a great way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. How better to criticize the recent drought of rom-coms than to make a good one?

Earlier this year, the similarly themed comedy No Strings Attached approached the same topic from a safer, sappier angle and yet by embracing the genre it managed to find its small charms. The couple in that film (Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher) knew they were falling in love, that they were in a relationship, but even if they tried to hide it, the movie didn’t try too hard to deny it. It was a charmingly modest movie. Friends with Benefits finds a far more charming couple, more believably attracted to one another, and yet strands them in a less charming film, emotionally far behind what we in the audience already suspect and realize. These two good-looking people with the comfortable chemistry, twinkly eyes, and quick, easy smiles, love each other and care about each other and it’s completely obvious where the rigid formula of the film will take them. It feels like it takes forever for the characters to catch up to us.

Will Gluck directs the film which he wrote with Keith Merryman and David A. Newman. He brought us last year’s hilarious Easy A, but this film feels looser and slacker yet smaller. It’s filled with a terrific supporting cast, but they’re each given exactly one trait to play. If the one trait doesn’t work for you, you’re out of luck. It’s an ensemble in search of memorable moments that never materialize. Patricia Clarkson is Kunis’s wacky mom who, get this, is still seeing a lot of men. At her age? The movie finds this almost unbelievable. Jenna Elfman is Timberlake’s sister who is kind and supporting. Richard Jenkins (great, as always) is Timberlake’s father, still wise, despite suffering from Alzheimer’s. As for poor Woody Harrelson, he plays a gay sports editor and the film treats that as a big joke in and of itself and aggressively pursues any opportunity to make it one. If he has a line that doesn’t mention his sexual orientation I missed it.

Ultimately this is a film torn between its impulses towards sweetness and edginess and ends up satisfying neither. It’s a film that wants to get laughs from sex, but also earnest uplift from sap like flash mobs. It lacks a tone nimble enough to pivot between those emotions, which is just as well since it lacks a script worthy of it. The cast is game, Gluck’s direction is often energetic, but the self-deluded picture lacks the zip and skill of its ambition to tear down convention while blindly inhabiting it. From time to time it’s an adequate romantic comedy, but why’s it so unhappy about it?

Rumor Has It: EASY A

Easy A is jet-propelled by so much comedic energy that it’s perhaps inevitable that the stress from the sheer force of hilarity would start to pull it apart by the conclusion. Luckily, the film never quite falls apart. In fact, it’s the most consistently funny movie I’ve seen in a long time and easily the funniest movie of the year by far. It’s blessed with a great leading leady in Emma Stone, the gorgeous and uproarious redhead best known for stealing scenes as a supporting character in comedies like Superbad and Zombieland. Here she becomes a star, holding a whole movie exceptionally well, appearing in every scene and serving as our narrator. She’s fortunate to be carrying a movie that’s perfectly cast in every role, with characters being funny because of who they are in addition to what they do. This is the rare comedy that is completely hilarious in nearly every scene, often funny line by line. I rarely laugh out loud while watching movies; I usually end up enjoying funny moments with small snickers or smiles. Reader, Easy A had me laughing loudly and often. By the time the credits rolled, my face and sides were hurting.

That all of this hilarity ensues in a broad teen comedy that also happens to deal fairly honestly with teenagers’ fluidity of identity and basic rumor-fueled exaggerated life-and-death scenarios of high school is only icing on the cake. It all starts when Stone lies to her best friend (Alyson Michalka) about what she did on the weekend. She should have been honest and said that she barely left her room. Instead, since she had turned down an invitation from said friend to go camping, she lies and says that she had a one-night-stand with a college guy and lost her virginity. Unfortunately, the school’s biggest self-important gossipy do-gooder (Amanda Bynes) overhears them and soon the whole school thinks that Stone’s a floozy.

The plot goes on to feature an escalation of ridiculous rumors that Stone tries to harness for her own personal gain. She trades her increasingly terrible reputation for favors, though at first it’s simple charity, like when she pretends to sleep with a gay classmate (Dan Byrd) at a wild party so that the jocks will think he’s straight and stop beating him up. Later, she will have less noble reasons, like gift cards, for continuing the charade, all the while risking that the one guy she really likes (Penn Badgley) will no longer want to have anything to do with her, especially with their increasingly scandalized (or envious) and increasingly boisterous schoolmates, including Twilight’s Cam Gigandet showing off surprising comedic talent.

Bert V. Royal’s script is overflowing with great one-liners and the supporting cast has uniformly impeccable timing. These lines flow right off the performers’ tongues, barely letting in spaces between the laughs. On staff at the high school is English teacher Thomas Hayden Church, guidance counselor Lisa Kudrow, and, most chillingly, principal Malcolm McDowell. As Stone’s parents, Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci, both fine, versatile actors, present the rare teen-comedy parents that are smart, funny, and accessible. They are involved in their daughter’s life, are warm, loving, and energetic. They sometimes say embarrassing things and fumble around while trying to give advice, but they very well may be the best screen parents of the year.

This film is a big step up for director Will Gluck, who was last seen with his feature debut, last year’s truly awful teen comedy Fired Up. With Easy A, Gluck has created a very good teen comedy. It just might, though it’s a little hard to tell from one viewing, belong on the short list of great teen comedies. It’s right up there with, and sometimes besting, some of the works of John Hughes, which this film occasionally references. Gluck shoots with effervescent energy and style that ultimately works towards setting up the jokes. He knows just when to punch up a laugh line or get out of his performers’ way. Neither he, nor Royal, ever finds a convincing way to reconcile the film’s competing tendencies towards winking snark and sappy sentiment. Nor does the film’s narration, built around a webcam confessional, ever truly pay off in any big way. But I hardly care. Those are just the kinds of nagging quibbles that happen when I’m too far removed from the constant blasts of pure laughter the film provides.