"When people ask me how I know Em, I always say, 'We grew up together.'"
And they do. "One Day," which hit theaters last Friday, follows the relationship of two college friends, the irresistible Dexter Mayhew and the awkward but endearing Emma Morley. Jim Sturgess brings life to the rakish wiles of Dexter, while Anne Hathaway plays his romantic opposite. Audiences are given a glimpse into their lives every year on July 15. Based on the popular novel by David Nicholls, "One Day" is pure escapism for the unabashed romantic, but the beauty of the book is muted by director Lone Scherfig's uneven attempt to bring the acclaimed book to the silver screen.
The annual update with Dex and Em in the novel is like reading the diary of a particularly sporadic diarist. Unfortunately, the intimacy and intensity of the novel translate into incomplete, empty scenes with two dimensional characters in the film. The jerky scenes that dominate the first hour of the movie are more likely to give you whiplash than leave you emotionally reeling. The movie flits from Dex and Em's first awkward conversations on the night of their college graduation to Dex's reflective trip to India, from London to Rome and from insouciant optimism to bitter cynicism.
However, Scherfig never allows the audience to engage with the characters enough to feel any of the more complex emotions - a far cry from her last film, the critically acclaimed "An Education."
But, Scherfig is only one person. In a movie about the unbreakable bond of love and friendship, surely it is those characters that really run the show, right?
Wrong. Hathaway's performance in the film, much like her career, is peppered with moments of sheer brilliance within swathes of discomfited performance. She does the gentle self-mocking of Em's character justice but somehow fails to ever be vulnerable enough for me to truly love her. This may have been because I was perpetually distracted by her attempts at a British accent, which sounded more and more American with every scene. I wanted to shake her and scream, "British people will be insulted if you come up to them in the street and try to mimic their accent. Why would you think films are any different?"
Thankfully, when Hathaway's performance threatens to derail the movie, Sturgess gets the show back on the road, stopping it from being a complete car wreck. He seamlessly transitions from prim upper class student to downright dirty Cockney TV presenter. His charismatic performance far outshines Hathaway's two-dimensional one. Sturgess understands the lovable disaster zone that is Dexter Mayhew's life.
Near the end of the movie, however, there is a brief period of relief from the jerky, erratic scenes in the beginning. As the pace of the movie and Dex and Em's relationship slows down, the scenes become a loving ode to a romanticism that exists only in daydreams. In the end, the expansive shots of Edinburgh, Scotland, tender heart-to-hearts and poignant admissions finally elicit a fraction of what the book achieved. You will still be crying, not necessarily because of the film's finesse, but because of the notion of what Scherfig attempted to portray - an ordinary love story of exceptional intensity.
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