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Written by Sheila Seacroft
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21 06 2005 |
Directed by Nigel Cole
 A pleasant little film in the When Harry Met Sally mode, this is a reasonable way to while away a summer evening when not much matters and you don't want to be shaken or stirred by grand passions or thrills.Oliver (Ashton Kitchner) is a gauche graduate still living at home with a not very promising career ahead in diapers. Nevertheless he has his life plan, 'all his ducks in a line', (which we don't for a moment believe) of conventional success in career and marriage. Emily (Amanda Peet) is a grungy cookie in the Natalie Portman mode, way smarter and a wilder spirit altogether. We revisit them every two years over the next six, when their paths cross by accident or intent, during which time their lives change - he becomes a more or less successful businessman, she drifts from job to job, man to man, always confiding, as girls in these pictures always do, in the now obligatory pregnant, rather plain, gossipy friend (cf MELINDA AND MELINDA). Each time they nearly, but not quite, make it into lover mode. Nigel Cole the director cut his teeth on TV series like Peak Practice and Cold Feet, then went onto the big screen with such whimsical good-hearted movies as SAVING GRACE and CALENDAR GIRLS, and a certain British soft edge keeps peeping through.
The problem for me was that it always looked a lot like love from the beginning, or at least what passes for love in films like this, so there was no real progression or change in the relationship. The plot to some extent relies on their growing older and changing. Peet does this, at the end more Carol Smiley than Portman, but apart from haircuts, Kutcher scarcely alters, and it's a bit hard to believe the successful businessman phase, particularly with the sophisticated-girlfriend-cooking-posh-dinner-back-home scenario.
These are never real maturing people and this is never a real love story in the way that, say, BEFORE SUNRISE and BEFORE SUNSET are, but there are a few laughs along the way, and plenty of sense of joie de vivre and the pleasures of being together, friends or lovers.
And so the ending is happy, as you always knew it would be, based, as so much else, on misunderstanding, and wasn't I relieved we were not in for a Graduate style grand finale which for a moment I thought I saw lumbering up - it's all very well to be a minor WHEN HARRY..., but a sub-standard GRADUATE I could not abide.
Seen at Odeon Newcastle June 2005 |
