Mawkish, maudlin, mushy. Oh, sorry. Those words all mean the same thing. But they do aptly describe the latest film by director Lone Scherfig (An Education). One Day feels more like one huge snooze-fest, despite the presence of the marvelous Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe), and partially because of Anne Hathaway (she was bad enough on the Oscars; click here for my coverage of that televised fiasco). Hathaway couldn’t find an English accent with a GPS. Seriously, veering from bad British and shabby Scottish to a kind of weird Irish brogue, the girl who is this decade’s answer to Julia Roberts is sorely miscast. (And to quote BigDave from the YouTube trailer: “It’s like listening to Rebecca Black read from Wuthering Heights.”)
The problem doesn’t lie solely with Hathaway, however. Give some credit (or not), to the writer, David Nicholls, who adapted the screenplay from his own romantically weepy mega-seller (somehow the book escaped The Leaf). A cross between The Bridges of Madison County and The Notebook (at least those flicks had Eastwood/Streep and Gosling, respectively) with a dash of Same Time Next Year, the film is a love story minus the love. It was all the Leaf could do to keep herself from marching out of the screening room in frustration.
Bah! The couple – Emma and Dexter – meets cute on college graduation day in 1988 and then proceed to rendezvous – strictly as BFFs – every July 15, until 2006, or maybe it’s 2003. Could even be 2008, 09’ or ’11. Who knows? Who cares? There’s so much whirling ahead in time with so little happening that The Leaf was beginning to suffer whiplash. Oy! Dexter (bad choice for a name, cuz it recalls Cary Grant’s C.K. Dexter Haven in The Philadelphia Story and Hathaway is no Kate Hepburn), comes from money and becomes a drunken, drug-using, sex addict. When he’s “sacked” from his TV hosting gig, he rapidly falls into decline. One wonders what happened to all that family $ (his parents are played by Ken Stott and Patricia Clarkson, the latter in her usual wry, under-utilized mode).
Emma (couldn’t Nicholls find a more original moniker), comes from no bucks, is secretly in love with Dex, but settles for seeing him one day each year while she toils as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant (in London, no less), finally settling for an aspiring, geeky stand-up comic (Rafe Spall, son of the wonderful Timothy, sans his pop’s rotund jocularity). Of course, Emma is a poet/wannabe writer, and, in short order, begins teaching, pens a hit teen novel, dumps the geek, moves to Paris and finds a hunk. She’s ascending; Dex is on the downward spiral, though he somehow manages to marry the rich girl he knocks up (Romola Garai, wasted here and far better in the BBC’s fabulous new, The Hour), becoming a father in the process.
Do Emma and Dex finally get together? Do we care?
God, no. And it’s all too predictable: Once they do get hitched, all The Leaf could think about was: Who’s gonna get sick, croak or have an accident first, leaving those many wasted years in their wake. Perhaps Scherfig did what she could, given the material (does being Danish have anything to do with the utter blahness of it all), but when she piles on Rachel Portman’s manipulative score and gives us those run-up-a-grassy-cliff vistas, it’s all too much. Or too little.
Indeed, this flick makes Love Story (“Love never means having to say you’re sorry”), palatable. In short: One Day is One Drag.
