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
