This
movie has been on my radar for a while – I’m usually up for an offbeat, indie
rom-com, the cast is excellent, and the premise hooked me right away. Having finally got around to seeing it,
however, I’m sorry to report that it’s not all I wanted it to be. Despite a lot of promise and some terrific
performances, the story isn’t strong enough to make it as great as it could
have been.
Janice
and Tim are both searching for direction in their lives. Janice just lost her job and her
apartment. She needs time to figure out
what she wants, but she doesn’t have any space to do so; after moving in with
her sister, Janice is constantly bombarded with well-meaning advice, hints, and
pushes. Meanwhile, Tim, a living-statue
street artist, is beginning to lose faith in his choices. His girlfriend is fed up with his “dead-end”
artistic pursuits and has thrown him over, making Tim wonder if there’s truly
any worth to what he does. A bit of
serendipity puts Tim and Janice in one another’s paths, and, amidst plenty of
complications and interference, each slowly recognizes the other as a fellow “lost
person” trying to do their best in an alienating era.
I love
buskers, and I adore living statues. The
idea of a film about someone who spends his days as a living statue was
instantly intriguing to me. I’ll stop to
watch a street artist like that for a minute or two, but they do this for hours
on end. They dress/paint themselves up
every morning to go out and do it. And
then, even more significantly, they go home at the end of the day. They have friends, significant others, homes,
appetites, social engagements. What does
the everyday-commonplace stuff look like in the life of a person who does
something so singular? You didn’t have
to tell me twice – I was all about seeing this movie.
Unfortunately,
the films feels really overwritten to
me, belaboring its incredibly-valid points – about life, ambition, and
admitting one doesn’t have all the answers – by beating them into the
ground. Here, Tim and Janice are completely
and utterly the odd ones out, the nails that haven’t been hammered down, but the
ordinary, “have it all figured out” characters are so over-the-top in their
smugness, blandness, and/or obnoxiousness that much of the tension is excised
from the story. It’s hard to get angry
on Janice’s behalf when her sister walks all over her, or Tim’s when a gaggle
of corporate types look down their noses at him, because the sister, the
corporate types, and so many other minor and supporting characters are just too
exaggerated to be believable. Topher
Grace’s Doug, a douchey self-help author and set-up date for Janice, gets a bit
of a pass just because Grace commits so fully that the character feels more
intentionally satirical.
Where
the film works, however, is with Janice and Tim themselves. The writing can still misfire at times, but
the burgeoning connection between these two is much more solidly built, and
Jenna Fischer and Chris Messina (Danny from The
Mindy Project, which is how I first heard about the movie) both sell the
heck out of their characters. Every
moment in which the film really, honestly succeeds
involves them together; the chemistry between them is lovely and understated,
and their bond feels important, vital to both characters’ journey to figure
themselves out. Both actors are so great
that I’m annoyed the movie doesn’t match their wonderful work in it.
Warnings
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