ONE DAY movie review
One Day (2011)–**
It’s dishonest to call One Day a romance. Yes, it’s a film about two people who are in love, but it lacks the intimacy and chemistry to really make the audience fall in love too. The truth is One Day much more closely resembles a coming-of-age film… or a mid-life crisis film depending on what single date were watching.
The particular day on the calendar that we always visit is July 15, St. Swithin’s Day. In 1988, it’s when Dexter (Jim Strugess), a charming upper-middle class boy, and Emma (Anne Hathaway), a dowdy working-class girl, first spent time together. After a night of post-graduation festivities, the pair who don’t really know each make an attempt at a one night stand. It doesn’t work out, but something else happens.
For the rest of the film we revisit their relationship on the same day for 20 years. We watch Dexter skyrocket to celebrity and then burn out. We also see Emma’s struggle to become a published writer, a goal she eventually achieves. And each time we see them, older with life happening in between the dates, something generally gets in the way of their union.
Emma and Dexter do inevitably come together in One Day. Though by the time it happens I’m not sure why. More specifically, I’m not sure why Emma would end up with Dexter. The film’s most emotionally charged moment is when Emma surges with anger at Dexter, who hung up on his own celebrity (and women and booze and cocaine), ruins an evening out together. Later in the film, Emma’s ex-boyfriend tells Dexter that Dexter made her happy, and in return Emma made him decent. (Though apparently not decent enough to stop him from snorting coke in public restrooms.)
Of course, that’s really what the film is about, watching Dexter become decent. The audience learns much more about Dexter’s past and his family than they do Emma’s, so we a keen on the highs and lows of his life outside of his relationship. We know he and his father (Ken Stott) don’t get along. We watch as his mother (Patricia Clarkson) passes away from cancer. We witness his marriage to another woman and his subsequent divorce. But what we know about Emma is exclusively in her relationship with Dexter. That means One Day belongs to Dexter, with almost unnecessary intrusions from Emma’s point of view.
Emma’s there more for Dexter sake than anything else. She might as well be some magical pixie dream girl like Zooey Deschanel’s character in 500 Days of Summer. Director Lone Sherfig, who last directed the impressive coming-of-age drama An Education, might have been attracted to Dexter’s story, but seems tied to the weak romance. She might even have been comfortable with one single moment that defines the relationship, say like the Paris flashback in Casablanca. However, the stubborn insistence of David Nicholls’s screenplay (based on his novel) that we revisit the characters on on the same day two decades is too uncinematic to succeed.
As for Sturgess and Hathaway, they do their very best. But their chemistry is appropriately that of two old friends and not two budding lovers. They deliver Nicholls’s quips with charm, but never really get the chance to deliver performances. (Sturgess becomes distracting too as his artificial aging makes him look terminally ill instead of just older. Blame the coke?) There’s just nothing for them to cling to in a film that only offers voyeuristic glimpses into characters’ lives–without making them feel truly alive.
One Day, directed by Lone Sherfig and starring Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway, is now playing in theaters.
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