Couples Retreat: THE OVERNIGHT

Cramped cringe comedy near its most unpleasant, Patrick Brice’s The Overnight finds a boring married couple dragged into an unpleasant and unusual dinner party. Imagine Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? without the witty dialogue or precision characterizations. New to Los Angeles, the couple (Taylor Schilling and Adam Scott) jumps at the opportunity to meet new people when their young son makes a new friend whose dad (Jason Schwartzman) invites them over for pizza. He seems nice, but soon he and his wife (Judith Godrèche) are talking about her career modeling breast pumps, offering weed and wine, showing off his intimate paintings, and offering a skinny dip in the pool. Scott and Schilling do an adequate job locating the uneasy confusion the couple feels when confronted with what appears to be a pair of predatory libertines.

They pull horrified faces and slide into unease as they’re testing the limits of personal boundaries and inhibitions. It should be funny, but it coasts on thin characters’ potential embarrassment instead of writing funny scenes. (The cast is full of likable performers who’ve never been duller.) Schwartzman’s character sidles up to a stoned Scott, leads him to the basement, and coos at him about posing for some casual pictures, coaxing him to take his shirt off and bend over. That’s a scene played for creepiness. Even closer to horror-tinged squeamishness is a sequence in which Godrèche tricks Schilling into a massage parlor and locks her in a room, the better to look through a peephole as a stranger gets rubbed. So many of these scenes are shot with queasy creep-out vibes, especially as the color red washes through the cheap digital cinematography and we get intense close-ups of an eye twitching, gawking in cautious curiosity.

Such a stumbling and mumbling sort of discomfort, these detours into nauseous suspense had me wondering if we were in for a bloodbath serial killer Texas Chainsaw ending. Of course that’s not actually the case. By its final scenes, Brice reveals he’s been making a movie about how uptight we all are, and how we stew in our loneliness instead of reaching out to others. It’s a good idea in theory, but one that bungles its intent by trading on creepy-crawly horror movie mechanics for the majority of its runtime. Even though there are all the usual fumbling one-liners and boozing and dancing montages a party movie provides, they’re constantly undercut by a flat-footed unease that thinks it’s more interesting than it is. So visually and emotionally impoverished, I found it almost unwatchable at times as it continually teases explicitness and epiphanies it never actually gets around to.

As the night progresses, the discomfort gives way to tentative half-formed (half-convincing) friendships. All four characters spill insecurities along the way, like a cracked support group, but they’re revealing body image issues, marital boredom, and other ideas explored better elsewhere. And there’s no real sense impromptu therapy sessions are opening up naturally. It’s all too calculated for therapeutic exhibitionism, for revealing real discomfort as people blindly grasp for validation and comfort from strangers. But right where the affected creepiness falls away to a moment of real connection, the movie pulls back. It comes on so strong and wrong for the better part of an hour, forcing the audience to look at flat, ugly framing and smeary colors as characters engage in cringe-worthy behavior, it’s dismaying to see it go so flaccid in the end.

It wants to build to a transgressive open-minded climax, but is too cramped and judgmental to pull off a Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice breezy acceptance. How else to explain its most revealing scene, where wobbling artificial body parts are used for a joke, then later used as a source of magnanimous acceptance? It’s difficult to be asked to laugh at someone’s body and then, a minute later, get pat on the back for recognizing the error of body shaming. The Overnight simply lacks the dexterity to turn from a freak show cringe comedy to an empathetic coming together. It manages to back away from its final implications into a wan punch line instead of dealing with the far more interesting ramifications of the place at which it arrives.

Just His Luck: THE LUCKY ONE

By now, after the likes of The Notebook, Dear John, The Last Song, and more, the ingredients needed for making a Nicolas Sparks adaptation are awfully predictable. You need sun-dappled Southern beaches prone to thematically relevant rainstorms. You need an earnest, but troubled young man and a beautiful, suffering young woman. You need a wise, loving, but imperfect parental figure and a precocious little kid. All of the above must have somewhat tragic backstories and be prone to misunderstandings. The plot needs miscommunications and romantic obstacles and a conclusion that’s deeply romantic with moldy notes of melancholy. Death of a major minor character is optional but encouraged. The ingredients are then tossed in a pot (along with corn and cheese) and cooked until they’re a good, thick mush.

The newest iteration is The Lucky One. The earnest, troubled young man is Zac Efron. He plays a Marine who finds a picture in the Iraqi desert and, while he walks over to pick it up, narrowly escapes a deadly explosion The picture shows a good-looking blonde (Taylor Schilling) smiling in front of a lighthouse. He decides it’s a good luck charm. When his tours of duty are over, he heads back to the States, determined to find the woman in the picture and thank her in person. If it weren’t for that photo, he’d surely be dead.

He finds her rather quickly upon his arrival in a small, rural Louisiana town. She owns, works and lives at a dog shelter with her loving and supportive grandmother (Blythe Danner, underused here) and talented, but self-conscious young son (Riley Thomas Stewart).  But, for reasons of drawing this thing out to feature length, Efron can’t bring himself to tell them why he’s arrived. Instead, the ex-Marine gets hired to help out, which leads to several scenes of Efron moping about while starting a rusty tractor, hammering a broken gutter back into place, and dragging away fallen branches. You see, he’s going to fix their lives. It’s a metaphor. Get it?

The adaption by Will Fetters doesn’t think you will. In fact, the script is so simple-minded that it thinks incident will pass for plot and arbitrary events will pass for characterization. It’s a movie that relies on characters not telling each other important information and, when presented with new revelations, they will assume the worst about each other. And then, when things are finally straightened out, when characters actually open up to each other, the very important conflicts just fizzle out as if they never were a problem at all. But we just spent an hour or whatever watching characters dance around these problems, fretting over what amounts to nothing. From the first shot they share, it’s achingly obvious that Efron and Schilling will fall in love and live happily ever after. The only convincing reason to delay the obvious with unbelievable obstacles is to make sure the story takes 100 minutes to tell.

Take the character of the woman’s ex-husband (Jay R. Ferguson), for example. He’s comically threatening with a bunch of traits that make it seem like he was created from a checklist of nasty clichés. He’s an abusive, alcoholic, jealous, condescending cop with high-level connections within the local government. He’s not much of a character beyond a collection of traits targeted to provide maximum disruption in what would otherwise be a plot almost entirely without conflict. He’s a distraction; the only purpose he serves is, like Efron’s decision not to reveal his lucky charm, simply a way to keep the movie going. When the ex-husband has finally outlived his purpose in the plot, he’s written out in a comically overwrought and underwritten way that’s supposed to be a Big Moment, but is in fact just an atonal cop out.

The whole endeavor is directed by Scott Hicks, a filmmaker who has, in the past, helmed glossy prestige projects, adaptations of true stories (Shine and The Boys Are Back) and novels (Snow Falling on Cedars and Hearts in Atlantis). He doesn’t (and probably couldn’t) do much with the material besides keeping things moving and looking competent on a technical level. The cast hardly elevates things either. Efron has little experience in carrying a drama and it shows. He’s never convincing as an ex-Marine and his way of projecting inner turmoil is by keeping his face as still and expressionless as possible. Still, he’s far better here than in Charlie St. Cloud, that drippy movie from a few years ago about a kid who plays catch with the ghost of his dead little brother. Schilling, for her part, has a scene where she laughs and cries at the same time, which, if nothing else, proves that her scary, emotionless lead performance in the worst movie of last year, Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, was in all likelihood a purposeful decision to help reveal the lunacy of that project from within it.

But maybe the filmmakers didn’t want me sitting there thinking about even worse movies that Efron and Schilling have made. They probably weren’t expecting me to sit there thinking about much at all beyond caring about the characters and their situations. But I just wasn’t invested in anything that was happening on screen. Even when Efron and Schilling break their long, dull flirtation with a heavy-duty, fully-clothed make-out scene under an outdoor shower, it plays less like an expression of romantic tension, and more like another box to be checked. The movie’s so thin, programmatic and uneventful that I had difficulty remembering what happened in it even minutes after it was over.