Michael's Movie Grade: D-
A bland and surprisingly unpleasant romantic comedy.
This film is an adaptation of a play written by Michael Jacobs, who wrote and directed this movie. When you consider this film's stage play origins some of its faults make a lot of sense. There are many things here that might work in a stage play but fall flat in a movie. For instance, much of the movie's dialogue is taken up by speeches from various characters about marriage, love and loneliness. Every main character has multiple speeches and while this may work in a play, it seems awkward, forced and tiresome in a movie. There is also the fact that this movie tells us everything and shows us nothing. When it comes to the characters' backstories, which play a huge role in this film, we only hear about them through long passages of dialogue rather than flashbacks or any other cinematic device that could convey it much better. Yet these are not the only problems this film has. The worst fault of this film is the characters themselves. It is hard to ever care about them because they never feel real to us. The characters only have the slimiest bits of personality and nothing else. Despite the fact that these characters are supposed to be our emotional attachment to the film, they feel more like plot devices than characters and this is not helped by the way that they talk like critics trying to dissect what a film means than how anyone would actually talk in such a situation. Also for a romantic comedy this movie is actually kind of unpleasant. The majority of the film is spent with characters arguing and saying mean things about each other. Because of this, when the film tries to be that feel good romantic comedy, it often feels like too little too late. This may have worked if this film worked as an insight to what makes marriages go wrong but once you get down to it, it has little to actually say (despite how much characters talk about it) that we haven't heard a million times. There are also enough scenes that flat out deny that such a pessimistic outlook on marriage would be its intention. The result is a movie that is neither deep enough to work as a social commentary nor romantic enough to work as a romantic comedy.
This movie does have a wonderful cast, of great A-list stars including Emma Roberts, William H. Macy, Susan Sarandon, Richard Gere, Diane Keaton and Luke Bracey and all of them give good performances that can occasionally (though nowhere near often enough) give some life to the material. There are also a couple of good jokes here. However these simply aren't enough to make up for the rest of the movie.
This story may have worked as a stage play (I haven't seen the play, so I can't say for sure), but it simply does not work as a movie.
