Film review

  • One Day

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lone Scherfig (2011)

    David Nicholls’ very popular novel One Day follows two young people, Emma and Dexter, through their encounters on years and years of the same date (July the fifteenth) – from their graduation from Edinburgh University in 1988 to, in Dexter’s case, the present.  Even if, like me, you haven’t read the book you probably know about its nifty structure but if this screen adaptation is anything to go by (and Nicholls did the screenplay), the source material is swill.   The repeated postponement of the moment when this made-for-each-other couple finally decide to spend their lives together is tiresome.  The piffling bits of humour are often embarrassing.  Because One Day is not only very popular but also ‘much loved’, it’s soon clear that, in order for the story to acquire a semblance of depth, Nicholls will have to parachute in supplies of extreme tragedy; clear too that the recipient of these supplies, in order to give him a bit of substance, will have to be the egotist Dexter rather than decent, industrious, quietly humorous Emma.

    For most of Lone Scherfig’s film, I didn’t understand on what basis we were meant to accept that the pair, from the moment they spend graduation night together, were emotionally inseparable.  They’ve never spoken to each other during their student years and, though they share a bed, they don’t appear to have sex that first time:  we seem meant to believe rather that they’re best friends at first sight.  When Emma dies in a road accident, Dexter keeps her alive by remembering her.  He starts having flashbacks to 15 July 1988 so that, right at the end of the movie, what they had going between them from the start becomes a little clearer.   (And it’s an unexpected bonus to see Edinburgh again – including Salisbury Crags and views from high up in them – after its disappearance only five minutes into the picture.)  It remains a mystery, though, what Anne Hathaway’s Emma sees in Jim Sturgess’s Dexter.  He’s not an infuriating-but-irresistible bastard:  he’s just perennially callow, innocuously good-looking, puppyishly uninteresting.  Dexter’s mother (Patricia Clarkson) tells her son from her deathbed that she’s sure he’s going to be a fine, honourable, compassionate human being in time but that, just at present, he’s not as nice as he used to be:  Dexter’s been corrupted by transient fame and fortune as a TV celebrity, and the drink and drugs that go with it.  I had no idea what his mother was talking about.  As far as the viewer can see, Dexter remains the same selfish lightweight he’s been from the word go.

    As someone who loathed Peter Flannery’s mid-1990s television serial Our Friends in the North, with its strenuously contrived connection between the events in the four main characters’ lives and the larger social and political upheavals happening around them, I’m not exactly complaining that the outside world in One Day barely seems to impinge on Dexter and Emma – but their universe is remarkably self-contained.   (It may be that this hermetically sealed quality is part of the book’s appeal – that it helps to make the tale seem a ‘timeless’ love story.)    There are a very few references to films and the odd pop song on the soundtrack (which at least makes a change from Rachel Portman’s obvious score), and that’s about it.  You might think that limiting the narrative to a single day should simplify the task of adapting a novel for cinema but there are clumsy and untidy bits in Nicholls’s screenplay.  In 1994, Dexter’s father comes to the television studio during rehearsals for the show that his son hosts:  the visit is hilariously pointless except that it imparts the information that Dexter’s mother has passed away – although it could hardly be more obvious from Patricia Clarkson’s turn in the 1993 episode that she won’t see another year.   When Dexter visits Emma in Paris c 2003 she’s become a best-selling children’s writer:  we never see or hear any more about this not insignificant career development, aside from a glimpse of her quaint portable typewriter.

    Lone Scherfig showed in An Education  how well she can direct actors.  Except for Sturgess and the miscast Clarkson, she proves it again here, with material that’s much inferior.  As in Love Story, the boy comes from a privileged background; the girl has to work for everything she gets.   In the early stages, Hathaway’s Northern accent and calculated eccentricity make her Jane Horrocks-ish but it takes a lot of determination to dislike Anne Hathaway and she settles down to give a performance that’s not only charming but very skilful.  (And she gets the Northern twang to work for her in a sequence in which, waitressing in a Tex-Mex-type eatery, Emma rattles off, word perfect, what distinguishes a burrito from an enchilada etc.)  I gather from Sally that Emma’s meant to be a beautiful person rather than a terrific face and figure but casting Anne Hathaway in the part brings its own pleasures:  as in The Devil Wears Prada, the doomed-to-failure attempts to make her look less than lovely are amusing.  (In the early years, Emma wears clumpy boots and wire-rimmed spectacles and doesn’t care what her hair looks like.)  When the pair’s reversals of fortune have occurred and the divorced, career-less Dexter visits Emma in Paris, and she’s on the verge of turning into J K Rowling, Hathaway wears a dark blue dress in which she looks stunning.  This brought a smile to my face – and kept it there for as long as she remained on screen in this costume.  It’s a mark of what an effortlessly strong presence Hathaway has become (and of the gulf between her and Jim Sturgess) that, although most of what happens to Emma is less ‘dramatic’ than the events in Dexter’s life, she’s the one in whom you stay interested.

    Thanks to their intelligence as actors and Scherfig’s sensitive handling of their scenes, Rafe Spall and Romola Garai both do well in what should be the hopeless roles of, respectively, Ian, the reliably unfunny stand-up manqué with whom Emma spends years of her life, and Sylvie, to whom Dexter’s briefly married and with whom he has a child.  Every so often, Spall looks worryingly like Steve Coogan but the sympathetic depth and human detail of his portrait of the no-hoper Ian keep reassuring you that resemblance is only superficial.   Playing a girl without a sense of humour, Romola Garai is often very funny (especially in a sequence at a wedding).   She also shows, and very economically, Sylvie developing as a character – in a way that even Hathaway doesn’t always quite manage.  The Emma/Ian and Dexter/Sylvie relationships are utterly incredible but three of the four players concerned make them more tolerable to watch than they deserve to be.  Even allowing for the fact that father and son don’t get on, Ken Stott isn’t convincing as Dexter’s father but the actor’s weary wit just about sees him through.

    29 August 2011

  • Love & Other Drugs

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Edward Zwick (2010)

    An overlong and eventually grotesque combination of sex comedy and incurable-illness-love-affair.  Edward Zwick’s movie is all the more grotesque because it’s often not a combination at all:  he shoves in a slab of comedy whenever the drama’s wilting, and vice versa.  Zwick’s first feature was About Last Night (1986); otherwise, he’s not a name you’d readily associate with these two kinds of material, and he’s crude in his handling of both.   His idea of directing comedy is evidently that you must be frenetic and can’t be too frenetic.  This makes the first twenty minutes or so of Love & Other Drugs nearly unbearable; without Jake Gyllenhaal’s wit and resource as Jamie Randall, an expert seducer (qua lover and drug salesman), you could strike out the ‘nearly’.  An electronics store where Jamie’s working at the start of the film, the Randall family dinner table, the Pfizer training programme Jamie gets himself onto – wherever a sequence takes place it has the same forced tempo, high volume and hectic overacting, except for Gyllenhaal, Kimberly Scott (as a stern but biddable receptionist) and Jill Clayburgh (in her brief appearance as Jamie’s mother).  It’s a real relief when a doctor, played by Hank Azaria at a believable human level, arrives on the scene.

    When Jamie meets one of the doctor’s patients, a woman in her mid-twenties called Maggie Murdock with early onset Parkinson’s, Love & Other Drugs gets interesting for a while – thanks to the chemistry of Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, and because this is the only part of the film where its two aspects are working in any kind of synergy.  (I was never clear what Maggie did for a living:  she appears to be a photographer, who works part-time as a waitress and occasionally accompanies groups of senior citizens on coach trips.)  It feels like some time since we had a screen friendship or romance with one of the pair having a fatal disease.  There’s an interest too in seeing what has and hasn’t changed in the components of this sub-genre.  It may be unusual to reveal the illness from the start and there’s certainly a lot more intercourse and nakedness than there was in Love Story but the doomed heroine’s beauty still isn’t much affected by her affliction.  Anne Hathaway’s Parkinsonian tremor comes and goes discreetly and the pale make-up accentuates her doe eyes and mile-wide smile.    Hathaway has come quite a way – further than Gyllenhaal – since they last appeared together, in Brokeback Mountain (2005).  Although Love & Other Drugs is a bad film, it reminds you of the dramatic depth and range she showed in Rachel Getting Married and makes you look forward to seeing her in better roles.   (She’s particularly convincing here in suggesting someone who talks fast and smart to keep her demons at bay.)   Although he’s a good actor, Gyllenhaal hasn’t yet created a character that develops much over the course of a film – he’s charming but unsurprising.  But he and Hathaway both have very strong audience rapport.  They’re the kind of stars who, in spite of their potent glamour, have a reality that makes the people they’re playing seem to need your emotional support.    (Both are established stars too, in spite of their youth:  he’s thirty, she’s twenty-eight.)

    Gyllenhaal and Hathaway take their clothes off a lot in Love & Other Drugs – a new departure for her in particular.  While this obviously does the film’s commercial prospects no harm, it’s also essential to the centre of the movie – the point at which the sex romp and the love story intersect – because Jamie is meant to be a heartless Lothario and Maggie is very clear that she wants sex but no kind of relationship beyond sex.  She keeps asking Jamie to reassure her that he’s a ‘shithead’ but – of course – both find themselves struggling to resist the commitment they were sure they didn’t want.    If only the film were as penetrating in other departments as it is in the sex scenes.  It’s both comically and sentimentally crass – and anaemic as any kind of satire of the competitive workings of big pharmaceutical companies.  The screenplay – by Zwick, Charles Randolph and Marshall Herskowitz – is adapted from a piece of non-fiction, Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, by Jamie Reidy.  I don’t know whether the character of Jamie Randall or any elements of the love story in the film are autobiographical or whether it’s just the Pfizer background that’s taken from Reidy’s book.  According to Wikipedia, he’s now a screenwriter, author and Huffington Post blogger so it seems that he didn’t, unlike Jamie Randall, decide to prove he was a good person by going to medical school as a mature student.  (This revelation, at the end of Love & Other Drugs, calls to mind how Rock Hudson turns from playboy into neurosurgeon to cure Jane Wyman’s blindness in Magnificent Obsession – an association that’s another illustration of how little distance Zwick’s film has travelled from love stories of another era.)

    At the start of the film, Jamie’s family is celebrating.  His younger brother Josh has just become an internet millionaire and it’s through Josh that the hitherto shiftless Jamie gets to be a Pfizer trainee.   Shortly afterwards (in screen time anyway), Josh’s girlfriend leaves him and he moves into Jamie’s apartment.  At one point, Jamie says, ‘I thought you were supposed to be rich.  Why are you sleeping on my sofa?’   Screenwriters sometimes seem to think that admitting the absurdity of a situation is enough to make it real.   The only reason Josh stays on in the flat and Jamie’s life is to keep the dim laughs coming:  he epitomises what’s comedically objectionable about Love & Other Drugs.    Played monotonously by Josh Gad, Josh is fat and graceless – the unattractive polar opposite of his brother – and increasingly sexually frustrated.  Jamie and Maggie record their love-making; one night, Jamie comes home to find Josh masturbating as he watches the recording.  People in the Richmond Odeon audience reacted with disgust to this but it made me wonder how much that had to do with Josh’s being physically unpleasant:  we seem meant to accept the couple’s recording their lovemaking as not only sensible – something to keep for a rainy day – but poignant.  Yet at the same time – and again because Josh looks the way he does – his behaviour can be easily dismissed.   A few minutes later, the audience were back to laughing incontinently at him.   Other targets of the film’s humour include mousy secretaries who might struggle to get a date and tramps visiting dumpsters for the packs of Prozac that Jamie’s disposed of there (as part of his underhand campaign on behalf of Pfizer’s rival product Zoloft).   In fact, just about everyone in Love & Other Drugs turns out to be a self-serving creep and/or sex maniac – apart from the noble, funny, great-looking heroine and hero.

    While Jamie is attending a pharmaceutical convention in Chicago, Maggie’s trembling hands, as she gets coffee from a vending machine, are recognised by a woman who gives her a flyer for a Parkinson’s convention on the other side of the street.  Maggie goes and listens to fellow sufferers telling how they cope.  (I assume these people were the real thing rather than actors, which may be why Anne Hathaway, in the reaction shots of Maggie in the audience, seems to be laughing too much or gazing too admiringly at the humour and fortitude coming from the platform.)   Edward Zwick, a commercially dependable director, knows what he’s doing in this sequence.  He’s allowing the film’s audience to flatter themselves into thinking they’ve watched a serious description of what it’s like to have Parkinson’s.  Maggie texts Jamie to say where she is; he comes over and gets into a conversation with a man whose wife has had the disease for decades.  The husband has continued loyally to love and care for his wife but he advises Jamie to get out of his relationship with a Parkinson’s sufferer while he can.   Because Zwick encourages everyone in his cast to play emphatically, this moment lacks the startling matter-of-factness it needs but it’s still pretty strong.  I was briefly hopeful that Jamie might heed the man’s advice – might discover there were pragmatic limits to his altruism.  That would have been a tough-minded conclusion to the story (and have given Gyllenhaal and Hathaway some interesting scenes to play).  But the hybrid Love & Other Drugs wants it both ways – to squeeze every drop of misery out of incurable disease but deliver a happy ending appropriate to a rom-com.  As we left the cinema, I saw a few people wiping tears from their eyes, clearly delighted to have been moved in more ways than one.  This is a feelbad-feelgood movie.

    As Jamie’s Pfizer colleague, Oliver Platt looks much more like Josh Gad’s elder brother than Jake Gyllenhaal does.  (Also like Gad, Platt overacts, even though it’s higher-grade overacting.)  A more remarkable feature of the casting is that Love & Other Drugs features, as well as Jill Clayburgh, George Segal.  This is a doubly welcome event in principle but a pointless exercise in practice, stuck as they both are with a couple of minutes’ screen time, as Jamie’s parents.   I hope Zwick didn’t involve Clayburgh because she’d had a terminal illness for many years.  She died a few weeks before the film was released in the US and it’s dedicated to her.

    2 January 2011

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