You pick your friends, or so the saying goes, but that’s not
entirely true, is it? Circumstance, coincidence and closeness play a role in
friendship as well so that it’s quite possible you can look back upon a time in
your life and discover that you were drawn into a friendship that you didn’t
value until that person was already gone. Such is the story of Emma (Anne
Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess), two acquaintances who become
sort-of-friends only to circle around each other, flitting in and out of the
other’s life, for the better part of twenty years, flirting, toying, yearning
all the while to become more than friends.
We first encounter the two of them thrown together on the night
of their graduation from Edinburgh University in 1988. They’re in a group of
drunken revelers who stumble through town, but slowly, two by two, the
graduates peel off from the main group. Emma and Dexter end up spending time
together and then parting ways. Through the rest of One Day, we will check in on these two characters every July 15th
for two decades. Sometimes they are together. Other times, the day passes
without them even thinking of one another. This is ostensibly a romance,
presented with a shameless gimmick, but it’s presented in such a low-key,
casually unimportant way that the artifice of it all is hidden beneath the
dullness.
By giving us only one day per year, the little snippets of
passing time accumulate slowly into a big picture, but there’s also a lot of
exposition that must be shoved into what little time we have to spend with
these people each year. Emma struggles in her twenties, but then finds some
professional success. Dexter finds near-immediate professional success, but
he’s just as lost as Emma in his twenties, the sense of floundering aimlessly
only growing as he finds early success slipping away. There are two full human
lives on display for us to watch but we get only glimpses, leaving the
impression that the better story is often unfolding on the days we are not
privy to.
I found myself wondering if the film would be better, more
powerful and emotional, if we got to see more of these characters. Hathaway and
Sturgess do fine, intimately textured work, but there’s a sense of the whole
production struggling under the weight (or rather, lack thereof) of so much
thinness. I got a sense that the actors know more about who these characters
are then the film allows them to express. Even supporting characters like
Dexter’s mother, played by the reliable Patricia Clarkson, seem to fade away,
taking potential for deepening the film’s texture with them. Adapted by David
Nicholls from his own bestselling novel, unread by me, this is a prime example
of a concept that I’d imagine could work better with the nuance and detail capable
in text. Filmed, there’s far too much telling instead of showing.
As it plods forward, the plot of One Day seems to stretch thinner and thinner. Director Lone
Scherfig, of the well-acted and Oscar-nominated An Education from a couple of years ago, coaches some decent acting
but has a rather perfunctory visual style here and a flatness of pace that
works to dull the emotions. The years stamp onto the screen with each passing
day, allowing me all too much time to contemplate just how much longer I’d be
sitting in the theater, struggling to get on the film’s wavelength. Late in the
film, when one character suddenly dies, I found myself profoundly unmoved. But
then, in the final stretch, the plot folds over upon itself and gains some
shallow depth that is faintly effective and affecting. By then, though, it was
too little too late.
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