BEFORE: After watching "Made of Honor", I had a nightmare about my ex-wife, so now I've determined that SIX is the number of relationship/romance films I can watch in a row before I spark a stress dream. This one woke me up at 6 in the morning on Friday - in the dream I was in bed with my ex, and she was complaining about having spent $200,000 on fertility treatments to conceive a child with her wife, so the inference there is I guess she was in bed with me to get pregnant and try to save some money. But every time I touched her, she got repulsed and started choking. Nothing like this ever happened or will happen, of course, it was just my brain's way of torturing me after watching films about people with relationship issues. The worst part is after waking up from a nightmare, and getting back to reality, but for 10 minutes or so, that dream is STILL your reality, and it just stung. I had to go downstairs and watch an informercial about Emeril Lagasse's new pasta maker (which is also a juicer, and somehow also a frozen dessert maker) just to get my mind to relax again.
It might be better for my brain if I were to transition to Black History Month films, or trim down the romance chain in some way, but nope, the groundhog saw his shadow, so that means five more weeks of this topic. I'm a glutton for punishment, apparently.
Chris Messina carries over from "Made of Honor".
THE PLOT: A British college student falls for an American student, only to be separated from him when she's banned from the U.S. after overstaying her visa.
AFTER: This one brings together a lot of the themes from this first week of the romance chain - like "Almost Friends", "The Art of Getting By" and "Made of Honor", it's about a couple forming when one or both of them is a high-school or college student. Like "Made of Honor", it's about a planned wedding between one American and one British person, and like "Little Italy", a woman has issues with her student visa. And like "The Female Brain", it's about a couple that goes through some challenges, but isn't that every relationship movie?
Just because it has similar themes as other films from this week, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, just by itself. The same themes run over and over through all romance films, basically, and I think overall this one did a really good job of taking some of the old stereotypes and putting them together in a new and unique way. It's not a particularly positive or happy film, but still there are some happy moments in it, but hey, not all relationships end well. Not all relationships continue well, either, sometimes it's all about those bumps in the road and how people navigate them, or perhaps fail to. Bear in mind that this film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival back in 2011, and the films that do well on the festival circuit aren't always the ones with happy endings.
Without saying much more about the ending, it is rather ambiguous, and I'm trying to not regard that as a cop-out. Maybe if you want these crazy kids to work things out then you'll be left thinking that they will, or if you think that at the end of the day they may not be right for each other after all, you might have a solid case also. They have sort of an on-again, off-again thing going on for most of the film, because immigration issues and the resulting long periods of separation are what put a strain on their togetherness. Anna knew that her student visa was about to expire, so the simplest solution would have been for her to return to the U.K. for a few months, then come back with a work visa or a tourist visa or something. But since she'd JUST gotten together with Jacob a few months back, and things seemed to be going really well, she decided to stay, because doing so made her happy. (I remember not knowing exactly what to do after college, but since I had a girlfriend for the first time in my life, I decided to stay in New York. No visa issues, but I understand the impulse to stay solely to avoid being separated so early in a relationship.)
The director and co-writer drew this story from personal experience, he lived in Los Angeles and had an eight-year relationship with a woman who lived in London. So even though most of the dialogue here was improvised, some story elements feel very believable because they were drawn from someone's real life. The trip to Catalina Island, the gift of the bracelet, and the visa troubles all happened, and Jacob therefore is clearly a stand-in for the director, even though his character makes furniture and not movies.
There's no real way to mark the passage of time, though, so the audience doesn't always get a sense of how long it's been since they've met, how much time they're forced to spend apart in each instance, how long it's been since they've seen each other or talked on the phone. Graphics on the screen that read "three months later" or whatever would be helpful, but I can also see how they'd be distracting. You just kind of have to roll with things here and try to guess how quickly time is passing. And it's painful sometimes to see two people who were on the same page at first, but are struggling to get back into their old form, to return to some kind of balance, but circumstances and their own feelings keep preventing this from being possible.
We're also left to wonder if things might have worked out differently if Anna had followed the visa rules in the first place and left the U.S. for two months. It's a debatable point, I wish we could see a split timeline here, like in "Sliding Doors" to see both outcomes. But then if the director has used that format, I'd probably find a way to complain about that. Let's just keep things the way that they are, even though they get complicated. Sometimes, life just is complicated, especially where relationships are concerned. Maybe it's a bit refreshing when a film acknowledges that, instead of just automatically making things work out in the end.
Chris Messina is only on-screen for about a minute, playing one of Jacob's clients ordering furniture from him, but it counts. I had no way of knowing how small his role was when I scheduled this between two of his other films...
Also starring Anton Yelchin (last seen in "Only Lovers Left Alive"), Felicity Jones (last seen in "The Aeronauts"), Jennifer Lawrence (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Charlie Bewley (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Finola Hughes (last heard in "All-Star Superman"), Oliver Muirhead, Alex Kingston (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Keeley Hazell (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Ben York Jones, Jamie Thomas King (last seen in "Tristan & Isolde"), Amanda Carlin, Natalie Hoflin, Robert Pike Daniel.
RATING: 6 out of 10 glasses of Laphroaig whiskey
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