BEFORE: It's looking like the rest of February will be devoted to films about dating, and all the complications involved therein. Birthday SHOUT-out #14 goes to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, born 2/17/81. Happy 30th to the kid from "3rd Rock From the Sun"...
THE PLOT: An offbeat romantic comedy about a woman who doesn't believe true love exists, and the young man who falls for her.
AFTER: I've been railing against films that jump around in time as a narrative trick, or a screenwriting cheat - but this film is designed to show different days in a relationship out of order - for purposes of comparing/contrasting. So that's a little different - or is it? Certainly if the days were shown in a linear fashion, we'd miss out on seeing connections between certain events - but would the story really suffer?
Surprisingly, I didn't hate the effect here - maybe because I've taken to the concept of numbering my days, and looking for connections between the films I watch on consecutive (and non-consecutive...) days, and also connections between the films and what's going on in my life - so really, this is right up my alley. I also sympathize with the main character, since when I look back on my first relationship, which spanned almost 7 years, it's really as a collection of days, or moments - and I'm less concerned with the exact order of events, but like Tom, I've scanned through them looking for signs of the impending disaster that perhaps I should have seen coming.
I'm not really giving much away here, since the end of the relationship is seen before the beginning - so we all know what's coming, or more accurately, WHEN the what is coming. Let's face it, every relationship ends, it's just a question of when, and how. I suppose "WHY?" is a big question, but often an unanswerable one - part of the WHY here is that the two people have different ideas about the nature of love. One believes it exists and the other doesn't, and you can't really change someone's mind about that (or can you?).
If you do believe in love, the film details quite directly the ecstatic feeling of having it, and the terrible feeling of losing it. By allowing yourself to love, you're automatically putting yourself in a position of vulnerability, where your life is now affected by another person's opinion on the subject - if the object of your affection doesn't believe in love, or doesn't believe in love with YOU, it's the worst feeling in the world.
The film also makes some interesting points about the very concept of love - how much of it is real, and how much is a construct that comes from movies, pop songs and greeting cards? (NOTE: This Valentine's Day, Hallmark ran a commercial that prominently used a tagline identical to one of the fake greeting cards seen in this film - life imitating art?)
And when you look back on the arc of a relationship, will you focus on the good days, or replay the not-so-good ones, over and over? And in the end, will doing either make any sort of difference? Do our relationships help us become who we're supposed to be, or do they hold us back?
I'm not expecting any film to have all the answers - but I respect a film that raises some very solid questions. And it might seem easy to make a film about a very specific romantic situation, but trickier to find some universal truths about ALL relationships by depicting one - it took some nimble footwork, but I think this film accomplished that.
Also starring Zooey Deschanel (last seen in "The Good Girl"), Geoffrey Arend, and Chloe Moretz.
RATING: 8 out of 10 parking lots
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