Love on screen, as dumb as it comes
Life is not what it used to be for William Borgens (Greg Kinnear), a successful writer who’s had several books published and found some small celebrity status, but hasn’t written at all since his gorgeous wife Erica (Jennifer Connelly) left him for a younger man three years earlier. In fact, William spends many of his nights spying on Erica and her new husband. Moreover, he still puts a place for his ex-wife at the dinner table hoping she’d return without giving any notice. As for his afternoons, he has secret rendez-vous with Tricia (Kristen Bell), a younger and married neighbour woman.
He’s taught his teenage kids, Samantha (Lilly Collins) and Rusty (Nat Wolff), to be writers almost since they were newborns, and Samantha has just had her first book published. But she won’t share the news with her mother — with whom she hasn’t talked in years because she blames her for the divorce. She’s also sceptical about love and just has casual sex. That is until she meets Lou (Logan Lerman) a musician and classmate who has a crush on her. As for her younger brother, let’s say he’s a hopeless romantic and has fallen for Kate (Liana Liberato), a classmate of his at school with a drug problem. So now the question is whether or not love will mend these aching hearts.
The characters in the romantic comedy-drama Stuck in Love, written and directed by Josh Boone, are indeed stuck, but not so much in love as in contrived stereotypes, dumb clichés and even dumber happy endings. The more they attempt to come across as real people with real problems involving matters of the heart, the more they ring false. They act out situations written in the script, but these situations don’t stem out of the storyline in a natural, credible fashion. Take Rusty, whom upon meeting Kate decides he’ll save her from her drug addiction. How can he think that when he barely knows her? How’s he exactly going to do it? Why would she let him do?
Or take Mr. Borgens, an obsessive, yet cool father who gives his kids a monthly allowance to write instead of having them work at the local Mc Donald’s. Why would anyone become a professional writer this way? Why would a father who’s a successful writer do something like this? Incidentally, there’s a secret reason why Mr. Borgens is so keen on waiting for his wife to come back, which if revealed to Kate (who had discovered mum having sex with another man) would make her stop hating her. So why would a caring father allow her daughter to endure unnecessary pain?
These are some of the queries that a movie about real people would pose, and which Stuck in Love opts not to take into account. More annoying is what happens to Lou, whose mother dies from a brain tumour precisely when he was having the best of times with his new girlfriend. Why did he have to have a mother with a brain tumour in the first place? The bond between mother and son is not developed — at all. Let’s just say it all boils down to the fact that she doesn’t even amount to a poorly sketched character. She’s in the movie only for dying purposes.
Of course, this is not an Ingmar Bergman drama so we’re not talking about having fully fleshed out characters rooted in their complexities and contradictions. But even for being a light weighted romantic comedy drama, meaning a very respectable genre which mainstream US cinema has explored fruitfully endless times, Stuck in Love ranks below average. Comedy has to be taken seriously, so it should be of no surprise that the most elementary problems regarding the characters are also to be found when it comes to the dramatic structure of the film.
Think of a little inspired television movie in which conflicts are arbitrarily established, only to then be solved miraculously in a matter of minutes.
Think of a series of interconnected scenes with no imagination whatsoever that never add up to a strong storyline. Think of dialogue that’s only heard at the (bad) movies. Think of a family movie in which love mends all aching hearts, despite how terribly sick they were before.
And then there are the actors, who for the most part are good enough to be in another movie. For instance, Greg Kinnear, who’s shown his talent for comedy and drama too many times before. Jennifer Connelly still looks stunning, and even if she’s not a very good actress, she could do much better than this. Or the young ones, Lilly Collins, Nat Wolff, Logan Lerman and Liana Liberato, who may not be the best thespians ever, yet you can see they do have some talent and vivacious energy that a good director could use to the advantage of a fine feature.
Stuck in Love is the type of film that gives romantic comedy, and cinema in general, a bad name.
