Going the Distance (***)

It occurred to me, watching this, how even though technologies expand possibilities, our lives expand to run up against the limits of the possible. We acquire the ability to travel in cars, then take jobs farther away, saving no time. We can meet people from across the country, then strain to be able to see them. Long-distance relationships must have existed since the first cities were built, but now they are a more common feature among those who aspire to professional lives. It therefore seems like making this the basis of a semi-serious romantic comedy should have happened before now. In movies like Sleepless in Seattle, Serendipity, and even Gone with the Wind, a couple’s physical separation helps to create the romance. It is the sense of having overcome that separation that cements the relationship. But this movie is about the more practical aspects of being together, yet not together.

Justin Long and Drew Barrymore are the happy-but-unhappy couple in this sort-of-romantic comedy pitched at the same audience as the R-rated Judd Apatow comedies. (Director Nanette Burstein moves on to features after the successful documentary American Teen.) He’s a New York-based pop-star promoter; she’s an aspiring journalist in town for a time-limited summer internship. Recognizable faces form the supporting cast. Perhaps best is Christina Applegate sister character, whose way of quieting her kids—yelling “statue!”—is pretty hilarious.

Compared to a film like Apatow’s Knocked Up, or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the humor here is less consistent, and the transitions from mildly raunchy sex comedy to kind-of-serious relationship drama are less fluid. And the film is wobbly when trying to tug the heartstrings. Barrymore may have been dating Long while filming this, but she made a better on-screen couple with her last romantic-comedy partner, Hugh Grant, whose Music and Lyrics character was also in the pop-music business. On the other hand, I did like the way these two meet—she curses him out for making her mess up as she tries to get a high score on an old Centipede video game. This is emblematic of Burstein’s approach, which also balances the male and female views more evenly than Apatow and company.

So, rather than a romantic comedy, this is really about the limits of romance, even with text messaging, Skype chats, and other bits of e-modernity Burstein deftly works into the film. I genuinely wasn’t sure how the story would end. In reality, absence does not tend to make the heart grow fonder. The difficulty of retaining a bond over time and distance more often destroys than cements a relationship. Separation prevents establishing a life together. In depicting that, this movie is welcome.

IMDB link

viewed 8/9/10 at Ritz Five (PFS screening) and reviewed 8/11 and 9/3/10