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Review: “Definitely, Maybe”
By kyle | February 13, 2008
LOVEABLE, ACTUALLY
Kyle Smith review of “Definitely, Maybe”
112 minutes/PG-13 (profanity, sexual situations, smoking)
“Definitely Maybe” isn’t that funny and it isn’t that original. It’s so low-key and naturalistic and disarmingly soulful, though, that you can’t help but get caught up in it. Its kittenish softness disguises a story that sinks its claws into you.
The acting goes a long way toward selling this endearing Valentine’s Day treat. Ryan Reynolds does a nice job as Will, a disillusioned Manhattan ad man who, as the film opens, is hit with divorce papers.
Depressing meets alarming when he finds out his ten-year-old daughter (Abigail Breslin from “Little Miss Sunshine”) has just had sex education in school. She wants to know everything about Dad’s sex life, so he starts telling a long, long story about the women he’s known, including her mother, whom we haven’t met, starting in flashbacks that take us back to 1992.
Writer-director Adam Brooks (who also wrote the excellent Meg Ryan-Kevin Kline comedy “French Kiss”), perhaps borrowing from TV’s “How I Met Your Mother,” solves the chief problem of a dating movie: you always know that the two top-billed actors will stroll off together, with only the how and the jokes in doubt.
Brooks tosses in as many hooks as a mystery writer: who is the girl’s mother? Why is she serving her dad with divorce papers? We don’t even know who the lead actress is, since the movie supplies three major dazzlers, and most discomfiting of all, instead of expecting a happy ending we know Will is going to have to deal with his divorce in the end.
“Definitely, Maybe” feels fresh despite its many familiar elements. It’s cheeky about using Upper West Side locations as in “You’ve Got Mail.” It employs the female lead and the soundtrack artist from “About a Boy,” whose hero was also named Will, and even borrows the look of the poster for “Love, Actually.” One of the leading ladies works, as Sally did, at New York magazine; Will toils, for a time, as a political consultant–just like Harry.
Will comes to New York from Wisconsin to work on Bill Clinton’s campaign in the summer of 1992. When a movie hits this close to home–I moved here at the same time, and this movie filmed on the Upper West Side block where I live now–my antennae start to twitch at the “gotcha” frequency. But “Definitely, Maybe” gets it right: the era (cell phones the size of canned hams), the New York feel(Will stays at the dingy Moonie hotel The New Yorker, which has nothing to do with the magazine) and the excitement young New York had about Clinton’s promise. The movie even refers to Will with a word I believe I coined in my 2004 novel “Love Monkey”–manboy–and broadly resembles that book, presenting a frustrated and mistake-prone guy unhappily zigzagging among three women.
When he isn’t drunk-dialing Emily, the girl back in Wisconsin he intends to marry (Elizabeth Banks, who should be better known), he strikes up a friendship with another Clinton volunteer named April (Isla Fisher from “Wedding Crashers,” who is about ten seconds away from being a major star), and the two share a smoking scene that’s so sexy it could have been shot in 1940. But Emily has instructed Will to deliver a book to a friend of hers, Summer (Rachel Weisz), and he can’t resist peeking at it. It’s a diary. It’s got hot girl-on-girl stuff. Involving Emily.
Stopping by Summer’s apartment, Ryan meets a guy who is either her father or her daddy, a crotchety writer (Kevin Kline). At some point when I wasn’t looking Kline jumped from age 35 to 60, and here he’s a sort of lefty Lear roaring about the decline of everything. Summer treats him as an aging pet as he passes out with his calves in her lap, and on an impulse she kisses Ryan. “We should all have dinner sometime,” she suggests, weirdly.
It’s a superb cast, and all of these characters occupy a real-world space of actual jobs and the conflicts they can impose on relationships. ”Everyday People,” like the song that plays over the opening credits, they are as real as the folk you meet in New York, their wit flowing unobtrusively instead of sounding like a screenwriter begging for attention or falling into the setup-punchline rhythm of sitcoms. No one scrambles for extra laughs by pulling funny faces–especially Reynolds, who looks like Will Ferrell’s little brother and proved in “Van Wilder” that he can make crazy eyes with the best of them. Reynolds is carefully restrained–even a montage in which he’s a depressed drunk comes across as more sad than comical. At times he reacts too little. But he wants to shed his frat-boy rap and succeeds.
Suspense counts for nothing if you can’t figure out how to tie everything up, but Brooks’ final act is both touching, without being hokey, and cunningly designed. Much depends on a symbolic object of the kind that appears in a lot of screenplays. When it pops up, the movie has done such an excellent job dampening Will’s, and your, expectations, that it has a major emotional impact. By placing its love story in a setting that’s approximately as scuffed-up as reality, this movie sparkles like diamonds.
Topics: Movies |
February 14th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I liked your book, but “manboy” predates it — I knew someone in college who had that handle in ‘96.
February 15th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Yeah, but Adam Brooks, the director of this film, was unlikely to have been in the room when your friend was called that.