Lola Versus (***)

On the cusp of 30, Lola is preparing her doctoral dissertation and planning her wedding. (She’s an arty Lower Manhattan type, so it’s a destination wedding in Chiapas.) Expressive Greta Gerwig, odd, mumbly in Greenberg, oddly assertive in Damsels in Distress, gets a chance to play a sort of normal young woman. But most people only seem normal until you get to know them, and Lola doesn’t quite know herself, which is what this unromantic comedy is about. Or, more specifically, it’s about what happens when her fiancé suddenly dumps her.

Lola comes well supported with arty side characters, like the stock rom-com raunchy best friend, an actress starring in the hilariously titled Pogrom! Her other best friend (Hamish Linklater) is a guy (a singer in what sounds like a Joy Division cover band), and since he’s not gay, that gets predictably complicated. But in other ways, it’s unpredictable. What was most authentic was how breakups can be messy and not all at once. The fiancé doesn’t just go away. Her friends do go away. Lola makes mistakes and spends the movie trying to get back to normal, but in a way that’s more funny than mopey. In tone, the movie is about halfway between independent and mainstream.

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viewed 6/12/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/13–19/12

The Five-Year Engagement (***)

It’s nice when a movie has such an informative title, and this one, like the movie it describes, is amusing while also being realistically descriptive. I’d hoped it would relate to a minor but persistent flaw I see in so many romantic comedies, which is that the happy couple always seem to be able to organize an elaborate wedding for 200 within weeks. Here Violet (Emily Blunt) and Tom (Jason Segel) get engaged at the start of the movie, but upon making arrangements Violet is told that her preferred facility has no open dates for three years—unless she’d like to book for September 11. She would not. However, as with a few other recent romantic comedies—or perhaps comedy-drama would better fit the tone here—the real source of the couple’s difficulties is career options, and geography. Tom is an aspiring chef in San Francisco, but Violet’s opportunity lies in Ann Arbor, MI. Her field is social psychology. (You don’t see that so often in films.)

Written by Segal and director Nicholas Stoller, the team behind Forgetting Sarah Marshall (and the recent Muppets revival), it has a mostly realistic feel to it with only the occasional dick joke. (Decent ones, actually.) The assorted side characters are mostly recognizable from TV sitcoms, include Chris Pratt and Alison Brie as the best friend and sister, respectively, of the two leads. At the engagement party, Pratt’s character sings an altered version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” to an accompanying slide show of Tom’s previous girlfriends. However, this is about as broadly comic as the film gets. Several of the scenes are purely dramatic. Although I don’t find Blunt and Segal to be an ideal on-screen couple, their disagreements are pretty well done. The movie is just over two hours, but the ending is abrupt.

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viewed 5/20/12 1:35 pm at Riverview and reviewed 5/20–21/12

Midnight in Paris (***)

Peripatetic in old age, Woody Allen has made a romantic comedy Europe’s most fabled romantic city. But it’s the past, specifically the 1920s, that Gil (Owen Wilson) romanticizes. Engaged to a modern girl (Rachel McAdams), he’s writing a novel about a nostalgia shop, hoping to wean himself from his lucrative Hollywood screenwriting career. But his vacation becomes a very literal nostalgia trip when he’s transported, again literally, to the era of Cole Porter, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Porter’s performance (or that of the actor playing Porter) of his own composition “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” and other clues suggest that it is 1929.

Despite the highbrow trappings, what this is really like is Woody’s version of all of those body-switching comedies that appear every so often. Gil stays in the same body, but experiences a different time. He learns, more or less, the same lessons, though. Of course, it helps to enjoy the movie if you have any affinity for the famous figures of old, and particularly if you can remember such slightly lesser lights as the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Woody doesn’t work hard to set up the premise, and I have no idea how authentic the portrayals are. It doesn’t matter; they’re just there to be amusing celebrities, like all of the folks Tom Hanks runs into in Forrest Gump.

Forrest Gump had an emotional arc to it too, though, whereas this stays strictly on the light side. It is far less deep than Hanks’s own body-switching comedy, Big. It succeeds by virtue of a cute premise, not the paint-by-numbers execution of the premise. Even before Gil meets a sweet 1920s artist “groupie” played by Marion Cotillard—Gil’s use of the term “groupie” confuses her— it’s obvious that he and the fiancée are a lousy couple. Gil himself is an amalgamation of the ornery characters Allen used to play and the boyish ones Wilson usually does. Otherwise Allen sticks with the sort of upper-middle-class and wealthy, sometimes pompous, intellectual characters who populate most of his recent films. Allen does do one clever thing with the time-travel premise. He nicely indulges his love of early jazz in the soundtrack. And he lovingly depicts the city of Paris, especially lovely, as Gil would argue, in the rain, notably in a long, loving montage that sets the mood during the opening credits. Classy fluff, this one.

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viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/22/11

The Last Kiss (***1/2)

? A remake of the Italian comedy-drama of the same name, released here in 2002, with a screenplay by Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby, Crash). Zach Braff is a young architect who adores his girlfriend (Jacinda Barrett) but has marriage anxiety that may lead him astray. Meanwhile, his friends and his potential in-laws (Blythe Danner, Tom Wilkinson) have their own relationship issues.

+ The subplots surrounding the friends are mostly played for laughs, but the primary story gets under the skin of its characters and is both hilarious and painful, sometimes at once. The confusing period between college and adult responsibilities is the turf being explored, yet the older couple provides a different perspective. Danner is absolutely heartbreaking as a woman whose husband seems unable to give her the affection she craves. The female characters seem as strongly written as the male ones, and Barrett does a nice job.

- You’d think from watching American comedy movies that guys always want to stay single and women always want to get married. But I guess that’s not the fault of this movie alone.

= ***1/2 Worth seeing as a comedy; worth seeing as a drama, and sure to provoke debate about when a relationship is worth sticking with. One of the few American remakes of a foreign film that is a bit better than the source.

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