"The One I Love": A Most Mysterious Recommendation

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The One I Love is a marvel of the modern age, precisely because of one thing: its trailer.  This movie’s trailer reveals next to nothing about what the film’s actual premise is; that’s a damn wonder and a welcome one at that.  That’s primarily because the film’s major twist is so central to the wonder and enjoyment that this film has to offer that to spoil it would sabotage the whole film.  Unfortunately, that makes writing about the film extremely difficult, because it’s really hard to talk around the central premise of a film when attempting to review it.

What I can tell you is that the story begins with Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss) at couple’s therapy, demonstrating just how out-of-sync they are and the problems they face as a couple.  Their therapist recommends that they go to a retreat home out in the middle of nowhere and… that’s all I can say specifically.  What I will say is that the film starts to analyze the workings of Ethan and Sophie’s relationship, and the trials they face will either cause them to come out stronger or be torn apart.  Both Duplass and Moss give great performances, effectively conveying a wide emotional range that is necessary for this script.  Moss in particular is fantastic at shifting from chipper to deadly serious at the drop of a hat, so her casting couldn’t have been more perfect.

And now I must explain the film’s primary flaw in the most circuitous way possible.  See, the film starts off with a clear direction of exploring the dysfunction of the two leads, and would effectively work as an engrossing character study… if the film had bothered to stay on that course.  However, instead of focusing on the characters, by the third act the film is focusing on the logistics of the strange events that have taken over their lives.  But the mystery of these events is not what makes the narrative interesting; sometimes films are structured with the assumption that weird things happen, because that’s what drives a story forward, but The One I Love seems to miss the forest for the trees and is content to explore its own uninteresting (and ultimately unresolved) lore.

That’s a paragraph that I assure you makes sense more when you see the film, and I do recommend this film, if only for the sense of mystery it evokes and the great character performances by Duplass and Moss.  It’s a film where the ride is more fun than the conclusion, where a sly game of hide the ball ultimately reveals that there is no ball, but damn was it fun to guess where it was.  Give this one a rental if only to see what the big mystery is all about.

How did I do?  Did I adequately convey my thoughts on a film that I felt it necessary to be so oblique about?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"What If": Formulaic, Yet Endearing

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Romantic comedies have a bad reputation for being lazy, derivative, and overly-reliant on formula, and it’s usually a well-deserved criticism.  Romantic comedies are to the female demographic what generic action flicks are to the male demographic, and they generally serve only to fill in box office schedules for weekends where there aren’t any big blockbuster releases.  They’re cheap to produce and there’s always an audience for them, so it’s easy to see why studios are willing to make a few every year without much thought put into them.  That’s why What If seems to me like some sort of bizarre paradox, because it is certainly derivative and formulaic, but it gets by almost entirely on a charm that certainly took some thought and effort to realize.

The story is your standard boilerplate rom-com set-up: two attractive twenty-somethings meet and then spend the entire film awkwardly denying their attraction for one another.  This is nothing new, but the chemistry between stars Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan makes their friendship and budding romance believable, something that most star-studded romantic comedies seem to miss entirely for the sake of just having the big-name actor and actress of the week.  When you get right down to it, What If works precisely because it embraces romantic comedy conventions and is determined to make the best version it possibly can.  And this goes for the comedy as well, as the film has a witty script that rapid-fires jokes that are consistently funny and delivered with the self-aware sincerity of close friends trying to make each other laugh.

Unfortunately, despite the film’s loving embrace of the oft-overbaked rom-com conventions, it also falls into one of the genre’s inherent pitfalls: emphasizing the inherent differences in the sexes.  Both Radcliffe and Kazan have a best friend archetype to bounce their woes off of; Radcliffe’s dude-bro friend is constantly encouraging him to make a move on Kazan, even though she already has a boyfriend; Kazan’s sister is consistently trying to make moves on Radcliffe, which stokes a jealousy in Kazan.  These conventions wouldn’t be so bad if every single conversation they had wasn’t about making stereotypical assumptions based on the other lover’s sex, and then using the next scene to affirm those assumptions.  This ball gets bounced back and forth for the entire duration of the film, and it gets tiresome if you realize that men and women truly can just be friends without any sort of romantic involvement.  The point of a romantic comedy is to ensure that the leads end up together by the end, but by framing the central conflict around whether or not the two leads can maintain a friendship, the film cheapens that genuine friendship by emphasizing a missing sexual component.

Inherent flaws aside, I liked What If.  It’s about as good as the romantic comedy genre gets, and while that isn’t high praise, I found this film to be a worthy-enough distraction.  Probably worth a rental if this is your sort of thing.

How do you think Daniel Radcliffe’s post-Potter career is shaping up?  Let me know in the comments below.

"The Giver": Made Too Late To Be Relevant

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The Giver is a hard movie to take seriously.  Based on the godmother of all dystopian teen fiction that so permeates the cinematic landscape, The Giver had yet to receive a big-screen adaptation, despite being an award-winning novel and a cornerstone to high school English curriculums.  But that was probably a good thing, as the reason the book is so beloved is that it is largely a symbolic tale, not really concerned with the logistics of its failed utopia, but more so with using its setting to communicate a message about our own world.  And yes, that message is little more than an overly-simplified analysis of how the pursuit of absolute equality can lead to the destruction of our individuality, but as teen fiction, it’s hard to fault the story for resonating with that demographic’s primary emotional concern.  The Giver tends to be really thematically problematic when you really examine it, but for once, I’m not going to delve into that aspect of the film.  There are plenty of places when you can read about the thematic issues of The Giver book, especially those concerning its heavy-handed allegories for euthanasia and abortion.  Instead, I want to point out the specific reason why the film doesn’t work.

As I pointed out, The Giver is largely a symbolic story, revolving around a society that has removed all strife and conflict by sapping the world of anything resembling diversity, whether that be in thought, feeling, or even in the ability to see color.  That’s fine on paper, but in order to translate that type of story to the big screen, there need to be some truly ambitious aspirations in order to make something entertaining to watch while still remaining true to the spirit of the novel.  And the film seems to start off with that intention, keeping the world devoid of color until protagonist Jonas begins to unlock his potential as the Receiver of Memories.  The teen actors are your standard stock wannabes hoping for a shot at the big time and think this film is it (spoiler: it isn’t), but Jeff Bridges (the eponymous Giver) and Meryl Streep (the evil Chief Elder) give performances that seem to demonstrate that they actually give a damn about the production’s success.

Unfortunately, this is also an attempt to be a summer blockbuster with a target audience of teenagers, so the film must obligatorily lean toward action-heavy by the third act.  Jonas comes to a conclusion that he must abduct an infant about to be euthanized and take it with him outside the community in order to survive, and this leads to some half-assed chase scenes limited by the fact that nobody in this universe is supposed to understand violence.  The film’s plot adds this strange condition that, once Jonas escapes his community and reaches a certain point beyond its borders, everyone will suddenly remember what it is like to have feelings again.  Logistically, I have no idea how this works, and once that magical turning point is reached, the film sort of just ends with only a generic voiceover as an epilogue.

The main problem with The Giver as a movie is that it tries too hard to work the classic novel’s story into the same framework as modern dystopian teen fiction films, like The Hunger Games or Divergent.  By forcing the film into having an action-oriented third act and a magic happy ending MacGuffin to drive the plot forward, the story has been robbed of its identity.  If The Giver had been allowed to be its own thing, it probably would have been an alright movie, inherent thematic issues aside.  As it stands, though, it’s hard to hate The Giver, but it’s hard to care much for it either.

How do you feel about the classic novel?  Disagree with me on the quality of its thematic messages?  Discuss in the comments below.