An experiment in fidelity
Wanderlust full of dark consequences
Wanderlust begins with Joy, the British therapist played by Toni Collette, getting back on the bike, literally and figuratively. Out of commission after an accident that left her with a broken hip, she straps on an industrial-grade helmet and pedals slowly down the street, even though she’s still having trouble walking.
At about the same time, she tries restarting another activity, sex with her schoolteacher husband, Alan (Steven Mackintosh). This doesn’t go as well. “I don’t think you want to have sex with me,” he says, and Joy’s silent reaction — Collette’s darting eyes signalling sheepishness, guilt and relief — leaves no doubt that he’s right.
The opening credits of Wanderlust — a BBC OneNetflix series, created and written by British playwright Nick Payne, that came to Netflix on Friday — include a definition of the show’s title: strong longing for or impulse toward wandering. Its six hour-long, comic-dramatic episodes chronicle a controlled experiment in indulging such an impulse.
Joy and Alan quickly work out their frustrations, he with his fellow teacher, Claire (Zawe Ashton), and she with a cop from her hydrotherapy class (William Ash of The Tunnel), and just as quickly confess to each other. Joy, a problem solver, proposes that they continue having sex with others while maintaining their marriage. Alan offers up some passiveaggressive evasions, but he’s into it, too, if not as determinedly as Joy.
“It’s the difference between a snack and a meal,” he says. “Maybe.”
Payne’s best-known play, the romantic tragedy Constellations, which was produced on Broadway with Ruth Wilson and Jake Gyllenhaal, was exceptionally smart and moving. And as Wanderlust (which was based on another of his plays) gets going, you can anticipate that he’ll have an interesting take on love and fidelity and look forward to seeing it fleshed out by Collette, who can bring complicated characters to life with seemingly no effort.
But that’s not where Wanderlust is going. Payne seems to be conducting his own experiment: to see how closely he can mimic the shallow charms of a Richard Curtis rom-com. He does a good job overall, demonstrating the same ability to jump between laboured comic business and sombre melodrama, often within a scene; the same willingness to make his characters look ridiculous; the same habit of getting out of a bland or nonsensical scene by ending on a non sequitur punch line; the same reliance on snippets of pop music to pump up emotion.
Payne is artsier, though, which means a higher level of literary name-dropping — Joy and Alan’s 16-year-old son, Tom (Joe Hurst), courts his high school crush using tickets to a Zadie Smith reading — and a more insistent focus on glum psychology and dark consequences.
Joy’s idea works well at first, magically rekindling her and Alan’s interest in each other. And it looks like the series will explore the question of whether they can happily maintain both their marriage and their affairs, especially Alan’s increasingly intimate attachment to Claire. At the same time, in an intricate but not very interesting counterpoint, we see the fumbling beginnings of relationships for their three children and the depressing impasses reached by several of Joy’s therapeutic clients.
Then along comes a stunt episode — an entire hour devoted to a session between Joy and her own therapist, played by Sophie Okonedo, playing out in something close to real time. Payne changes the rules on us, taking a theme of debilitating grief that had been hinted at and making it the central term of his equation. (It’s also a narrative cheat that allows Payne to arrange his ending the way he wants it, regardless of how Joy’s and Alan’s liaisons would be likely to play out in real life.)
If you’ve reached that point, you might as well hold on to see whether Joy and Alan can ride it out. Before that, the performances and Payne’s skill with dialogue have their rewards, although they’re attenuated — Payne doesn’t have the conviction of a true shlockmeister, and he doesn’t deliver the boffo laughs and tears of a Curtis film.
Ashton, who was funny as the uptight assistant of Jason Isaacs’ detective in Case Histories, is clever and touching here as Claire, who surprises herself (and the audience) by falling for Alan. Isis Hainsworth of Harlots is good as the quiet best friend of Joy and Alan’s son.
For her part, Collette sails through the six hours, easily carrying off the therapy episode and making the good moments Payne gives her delightful, like Joy’s karaoke rendition of Here Comes the Rain Again or the happiness on her face when she’s standing alone in a club listening to the band. Collette makes us believe in Joy; if only Payne had made us care.