Once, there were love stories. Then, stories like When Harry Met Sally, about friendships that turn into love stories. Finally, there were stories about sex that turned into love stories. Ashton Kutcher made one of those, A Lot Like Love, a few years ago. To the moral chagrin of some, Hollywood has now assimilated the era of the fuck buddy. In It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep tries the friends-with-benefits thing with her ex-husband. In Love & Other Drugs, whose main characters mirror the two here, Anne Hathaway tells Jake Gyllenhaal to skip the getting-to-know-you chatter. The moralists should take heart though, because these movies tell us that the fuck-buddy relationship is inherently unstable. Deeper feelings cannot be squelched, messy pasts or Parkinson's disease be damned. And so we know that the efforts of Adam and Emma (Kutcher and Natalie Portman) to keep their relationship on a lower plane are doomed to fail. Even the permanently smirking Kutcher will have to act serious.
And he does. I have to admit I thought this was going to be crap. Director Ivan Reitman once made Stripes and Ghostbusters, but more recently My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Evolution. (The writer is a first timer, Elizabeth Meriwether.) But this romantic comedy does a better job than I’d have thought setting up its premise, especially since the first time we see Ashton as Adam he looks like a frat-party jackass. In the same scene, costar Greta Gerwig, who along with Mindy Kahling plays Emma’s roommate, first appears wearing shorts with “Whore” written on the rear. So I was prepared for a crass, contrived 90 minutes. But when a more grown-up Adam runs into Emma, now a busy doctor, again a few years later, he’s the one who’s ready for a relationship, while she’s retained her longtime fear of commitment. She tells him she’s too busy, so Adam settles for a series of quickies.
Emma’s reluctance to get serious is never really explained. While a freewheeling female doesn’t necessarily require any more explanation than her stereotypical male counterpart, it’s not as if Emma is juggling several men. She clearly likes Adam, not just sleeping with him, but won’t even grant him boyfriend status. Still, the lack of backstory’s a smaller flaw in a comedy than it would be in a drama. And Portman portrays Emma’s ambivalence well. She’s getting award nominations for Black Swan, but actually gets to show more range here, and that helps to make her character seem less thin than it may have appeared on the page.
Not to mention, the movie’s actually kind of funny, and even kind of romantic. I liked the supporting characters, too, who unlike a lot of romantic comedies don’t seem to be around just to support, advise, and spout man-woman clichés to the main characters. Actually, these characters probably could use advice themselves. Adam’s dad, for example, an ex-TV star played by Kevin Kline, is dating his (Adam’s) old girlfriend. True, it would be nice if there were more non-sex-related humor. The inappropriate sexual comment gets old as a punch line. (In the first scene, when teen Emma comforts Adam, whose parents are getting divorced, he asks out of nowhere, “Can I finger you?”) But better a little repetition than the collection of clichés that I had steeled myself for. And next time I’ll try not to hate on Ashton, who’s actually does puppy-dog sincere as well as he smirks.
IMDB link
viewed 1/18/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/18–25/11
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