Dir. Will Gluck , USA , 2011, 109 mins
Cast: Mila Kunis, Justin Timberlake
Review by Carol Allen
The idea of two friends of the opposite sex trying to keep their relationship strictly physical with no emotional ties was done earlier this year by Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher in No Strings Attached . Even if you didn’t see that one, this is a romantic comedy and we all know that in the world of film rom com, sex without romance rearing its pretty head just ain’t going to happen. It would be breaking the genre rules. So it’s up to the film makers to make the journey from point A to the inevitable as interesting, likeable and amusing as possible. And they don’t do a bad job here.
The couple involved, Timberlake and Kunis, both have their plus points. She is very pretty with both charm and a strong screen presence; assets which have helped her almost steal other films from their stars more than once (Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Black Swan to name but two), while Timberlake, who was deliciously creepy as Sean Parker in The Social Network , turns out to be a perfectly presentable romantic male lead.
Kunis plays Jamie, a New York headhunter who persuades LA based magazine art director Dylan to take a job in the Big Apple and the friendly rivalry between them over the relative merits of East and West coast lifestyle is one of the many amusing elements of the film. They’ve both been badly burned in the love game – we see them being dumped by the previous partners right at the beginning of the film – and have now taken refuge in the idea that romance is a myth cooked up by Hollywood (wheels within wheels). So as they get on like a house on fire, have a lot of laughs together and fancy each other something rotten, why not add sex the mix – just for fun?
There are some very entertaining ideas in the film – the scene where they are watching a cheesy Hollywood romantic movie together on television and making fun of it is one of them – and there’s some good dialogue, some of which is sadly a bit tricky to hear against the background effects. And, in view of the story’s premise, there are inevitably rather a lot of sex scenes. There are also some excellent supporting performances from older actors. Woody Harrelson, in what is actually a totally irrelevant role as the gay sports commentator, who works in Dylan’s office, is a bit of a joy. Patricia Clarkson is Jamie’s flaky mum, a woman with several pasts, who never seems to be sure which of her many lovers was Jamie’s father and Richard Jenkins is both touching and funny as Dylan’s father, who is in the early stages of senility and refuses to wear his trousers in public.
As we move through the inevitable steps of the rom com structure – boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, then fall apart in a cool and contemporary fashion and the writers pull all the various tricks to put off for as long as possible the inevitable happy ending – the film still manages to hold our interest, though the way it keeps them apart till the end of the last reel does strain credibility and goes on for a bit too long. As rom coms go however this is a perfectly entertaining date movie.
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