Director: Edward Zwick
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal. Anne Hathaway.
Not going to lie, during this film I fell asleep at least twice. I’m not saying it was boring on a The Informant level; it was New Years Day and I’d had maybe three hours sleep. No, the distressing part was this – every time I drifted out then in again it was like I was waking up halfway through a different film.
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal. Anne Hathaway.
Not going to lie, during this film I fell asleep at least twice. I’m not saying it was boring on a The Informant level; it was New Years Day and I’d had maybe three hours sleep. No, the distressing part was this – every time I drifted out then in again it was like I was waking up halfway through a different film.
So, let’s break it down.
Film A: Gratuitous Porn Masquerading as Slightly Art House.
Jamie (Gyllenhaal) and Maggie (Hathaway) are introduced through a pretty unrealistic set-up; pretty sure you can’t just buy your way into shadowing a doctor without express consent from patients. Apparently this film has never encountered patient-doctor confidentiality. Moving on; they meet in a fairly contrived way to the background of 1996 and pharmaceuticals. (By the way we’re only made aware it’s 1996 by the presence of a boom-box. No other 1990’s hallmarks, which I was pretty excited about. Where were Jamie’s Beverley Hills 90210 sideburns and where was Maggie’s Rachel hair-cut?) They then proceed to have loads of sex with plenty of actual nudity. I’m desensitised to Anne Hathaway’s boobs after Brokeback Mountain and I’m never going to be morally against naked-Gyllenhaal, but honestly, the number of naked scenes was unnecessary and at some points downright incomprehensible, like when I found myself asking – “Anne Hathaway why aren’t you wearing trousers? You’re completely dressed but apparently forgot trousers.”
Film A also includes: defining Jamie and Maggie’s characters as promiscuous and in Jamie’s case a serial flirt and a cheater and in Maggie’s case a misanthrope. She has Parkinson’s Disease though so we can’t really blame her.
Then I fell asleep I think because I got bored of the same sex scene over and over.
Film B: Romantic Comedy
Film B is genuinely that straight-forward. I awoke to two whole new characters. Maggie was the lonely girl afraid to fall in love and Jamie the reformed Playboy now hopelessly infatuated with this free-spirited wild girl. Who liked to paint or something. Film B was full of cliché’s. It was also full of Prozac and Viagra.
I got bored of this pretty quickly. I mean I’m not wild on overdone cliché’s so I faded out for a bit and thought about seeing The Kings Speech on Monday, which I was already well past realising would have been a much better way to cinematically kick off 2011.
Film C: Harrowing Sad Film About Sick People.
Right so, Maggie has Parkinson’s, in fact Young Onset Parkinson’s which really isn’t fair and is very sad. However this film kind of fails at making me care that she has it. It’s apparently at this point that the Parkinson’s becomes a problem for Jamie and Maggie, and inexplicably despite dating a girl with the disease Jamie has never bothered to look up symptoms, prognosis or the possibility of a cure. So he Wikipedia’s it or something then proceeds to try and cure it. That parts tedious and a little stupid.
They have some problems and some strife happens. And it doesn’t go well for them. More disturbing for me was the random point of view shift; the whole film up until this point is from Jamie’s point of view then all of a sudden it’s from Maggie’s and I’m mostly just a little perturbed that we just switched main character. I mean pick one, Zwick, don’t dip in and out. But anyway it all switches back to Jamie and I guess we can just uneasily move on from the whole off-putting interlude.
Film D: The Illogical Mish-Mash of Themes.
So I didn’t fall asleep or anything here, I got to watch the mythic switch over from one ‘film’ to the next. And it was abrupt, rather than sneaking up stealth-like as I assumed it might.
Jamie and Maggie work out all their problems without actually y’know, working anything out, I don’t know maybe they decide they want to go back to Film A because Films B and C were as incomprehensible to them as it was to us. Everything works out great; Jamie finds purpose and Maggie helps him do that or something. But she still has Parkinson’s so that’s pretty sad.
There’s also a creepy brother, some old people, a really unprofessional doctor and some orgies in this film but they don’t really make sense in the context of the film let alone here, so I’m leaving them out.
What doesn’t make sense (or what makes the least sense) is how this film is bad. It has Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway who are awesome actors, it has Edward Zwick who made Blood Diamond and The Last Samurai and yet somehow this film happened. The two protagonists are unpleasant so when we’re supposed to care about them we don’t. The continuity is illogical and frankly the writing sounds, in places, like a Dawson’s Creek script.
My advice: Watch something else.
2/10.
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