Old romantic formula turned on its head
Though it’s a far cry from anything remotely realistic in the relatively stagnant, and somewhat oppressive, pool of cinematic romance, I Give It a Year still manages to touch on something essential, as well as unspoken, in the well-oiled world of love.
The word is “disappointment,” but it’s really a sense of failure and deflation that goes beyond the bounds of mere chagrin, because when all those starry-eyed fantasies about true love and destiny start to delaminate in the ordinary drudgery of daily living, it’s not just a relationship that comes into question, but the very notion of love itself.
The movies tell us true love is almighty and unstoppable and worth fighting for but that means never having to say you’re sorry. It’s the end that every beginning craves and the beginning of happily ever after. But as this Dan Mazer movie asserts, it’s also a whole lot of wishful thinking.
When we first meet Nat (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Rafe Spall), they’ve clearly just fallen in love. In fact, Mazer (Da Ali G Show) opens the movie with the standard love montage that generally comes at the close of Act 2.
We get the long gazes, the pyrotechnic smiles and the exotic holidays surrounded by smiling onlookers. It’s all pretty as a postcard, but once they actually get married, things change quickly.
Now sharing an apartment and two completely different lifestyles, Nat and Josh soon realize they aren’t that compatible.
Josh is a somewhat lazy writer looking for amusement and deadpan comedy while Nat is a wellregarded professional who gives Type-A personalities a rather charming role model.
Nat wears tailored couture. Josh borrows a page from Woody Allen’s stylist and wears a T-shirt and the same beige flat-fronts in almost every scene.
The more we see them together, the more their relationship looks doomed, hence the title.
Their friends, played by Minnie Driver and Jason Flemyng, don’t think Nat and Josh stand a chance, and give their marriage a year.
It’s refreshing to see a romantic comedy start off on the wrong foot, and thanks to some rather dexterous comic dancing from the two leads, Mazer’s purposeful missteps through the prickly rose garden of romance are rather funny.
At times, it’s baseline toilet seat stuff and Christmas party embar- rassments. But when he really gets down to the nub of dysfunction, he lets the viewer feel the breathless panic that comes with the sudden realization you’ve just made a huge mistake.
Statistically speaking, more than half the couples that walk down the aisle eventually feel this overwhelming sense of failure: That despite the flush of hormones and dewy-eyed sex, there’s still a chasm of personality difference.
Yet, movies are loath to show such things unless they can be drawn and quartered into melodramatic tragedy.
Mazer keeps everything in this movie so light, that when Nat and Josh begin to realize their marriage is failing, it becomes an open door to giddiness.
They seek the advice of a marriage counsellor, who not only tells them it may be best to write off their losses now before they’ve invested too much time in each other and can’t find anyone else.
She also has a habit of writing “boring” on her scratch pad while they divulge their deepest secrets.
Mazer’s writing is a blend of lowbrow gags, dry British humour and some surprisingly subtle emotional beats that give the comedy real depth, which is important given that the back half of the movie features twin subplots involving alternative mates.
For Nat, marriage starts to look even bleaker after she meets her new business client Guy (Simon Baker).
Meanwhile, Josh is still trying to get over his relationship with Chloe (Anna Faris).
It seems everyone would be happier with someone else, but marriage is marriage, and Josh and Nat are grown-ups who’ve taken a vow.
Besides, their friends are more than happy to remind them that no marriage is perfect. You have to bend and compromise to make things work.
Yet, as we watch Nat and Josh lower their mutual expectations, struggle to create chemistry on date nights and bite their tongues when the other grows irritating, we can feel a small part inside of us start to die.
It’s that little spark of possibility, that childish faith in forever, the whole fairy tale ideal that somewhere out there, true love is waiting to unleash its arrow.
Mazer flattens that gushy defenceless creature with a tank, and for a short while, I Give It a Year feels unforgivably bleak. Fortunately, the writer-director fights back with a fistful of vulgar humour delivered by sidekick, best man Danny (Stephen Merchant), as well as some well-crafted scenes that exploit Faris’s gift for physicality — including a rather goofy ménage-a-trois.
Much of the action is familiar and formulaic, but the emotional tone is fresh because it’s willing to face the unromantic truth: You can’t just love your partner. You actually have to like him or her as a person for a relationship to last.