By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on Movies: One Day
One Day (Two and a Half Stars)
U.K.: Lone Scherfig, 2011
Few things in life can haunt or obsess us more than the romances that could have happened but didn’t, or depress us more than the romances that did happen and somehow didn‘t work out.
SPOILER ALERT, DAMMIT
One Day, a romantic British film (part drama, part comedy) adapted by David Nicholls from his novel, and directed by Lone Scherfig — is about one of the former, that maybe turns into one of the latter, but that in any case leaves us at the end with that sad feeling of wistful regret that some of us never get over.
END OF SPOILER
The couple involved in One Day are Jim Sturgess as Dexter Mayhew, a sexy apolitical playboy from an affluent background and Anne Hathaway as Emma Morley, a brainy, political working girl from humbler origins, who meet and nearly come together on July 15, 1988, after graduating from the University of Edinburgh. Missing consummation, they become best platonic friends for life, and thereafter, for the next two decades covered by the story, they meet again or experience memorable events, on many subsequent July 15ths, while we move from one crisis in their lives to another, always falling on the same St. Swithin’s Day, always pushing them forward a little closer to further romantic complications and bestsellerdom. Or perhaps not.
Whoah. Nicholls’ very popular novel, which I have not read (and probably won’t) uses this semi-Same Time, Next Year device as its main structural principle and plot engine, and apparently the book sold it to many enthusiastic paying literary customers.
Yet what sense does it make? As Dex and Em, hedonistic wastrel and the good woman he misses, hop from one July 15 to the next, we sometimes find ourselves in the midst of some pretty drastic changes in our main couple’s lives. Dex has some early TV on-camera stardom, spoiled by egotism and addiction, she rises from hard knocks to literary success, and both of them marry, unwisely. But sometimes, on that very day, July 15, some crucial, life-changing event takes place for one or the other or both, something that shocks them or sets them on different paths.
Think a bit. Recall the crucial life-changing events in your own life. Did they all take place on the same day? Did even a few of them share a common date, especially if it’s not a birthday or a major holiday, or in this case, maybe the time-crossed couple’s yen to get together and remember? Why then is this mysterious calendar hex happening to Dex and Em? Furthermore, why don’t they begin to get a little spooked, as major revelations or dire consequences keep accumulating each scary new July the 15th?
Might they consider just sleeping all day every July 15 to avoid whatever chastening truth or major catastrophe fate and the calendar have in store? Are they cursed? Are they playthings of fate? Prisoners of successive St. Swithin‘s Days, just as Bill Murray was prisoner of the same Groundhog Day over and over? Maybe there was some explanation for this anomaly, but I missed it (sorry), and it bothered me for the whole running time, and afterwards, and bothers me now.
Since the movie basically made no sense to me, I felt alienated from all of its would-be poignant or memorable happenings, though I was pleased at its literacy, pleased by its sometime intelligence, pleased by its alert direction (the smart ungloomy Dane Ms. Scherfig of An Education), even pleased at times by its attractive but not necessarily well-matched costars, Ms. Hathaway and Mr. Sturgess, as they stumbled ever July 15thward.
There are good supporting actors: the very active Patricia Clarkson pulling some heartstrings as Dexter’s dying mother and Ian Spall (Timothy’s son) as Em’s hapless comedian of a husband. And there’s another fine score by the prolific Rachel Portman. By themselves, the film’s first and last scenes, and the flashback coda, are touching. The whole thing might have worked for me, or at least worked better, if they’d just hopped from year to year, lighting on whatever day was most significant that year (not necessarily the dreaded July 15th).
But they didn’t. I wonder why. I wish they had.
Listen: Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It’s July 15.
