One Day Review

One Day Review

There is nothing wrong with an emotional movie. I love when a movie can make me cry, or make me laugh, or make me think, or make me anything. I appreciate being drawn into a movie so much that I care what happens to the characters. What I hate however is when a movie intentionally manipulates the audience into feeling these things. When a movie is overtly emotionally manipulative it irritates me to no end. One Day is an example of a story that really and truly deserved a better movie. I am sure that fans of the book will be angrily disappointed. The story is beautiful, the movie is not.

The movie begins and takes place on the 15th of July every year. Every year on the 15th we are given a glimpse into the current status of the relationship from its inception. Our characters grow and experience life and we are given the 15th to make sense of what has happened as if we were catching up with an old friend we hadn't seen in a long time. That's part of the problem with the movie, we spend so much time catching up, and figuring out where our couple has been that we never really connect with where they are in the moment.

The idea of watching a relationship over long spans of time is not new in movies, When Harry Met Sally did the same thing, jumping about in time to relevant moments, but with When Harry Met Sally we are given a more fleshed out scenario before the jumps. In One day we jump so quickly and so often, there were times when I thought to myself "wow I guess nothing happened in 1993."

Despite a muddled accent, Anne Hathaway does a good job playing Emma, the hard working yet pessimistic young woman who wants to be a great writer, but doesn't have the confidence or courage to do so. Jim Sturgess also does nicely as Dexter, the arrogant television host who becomes his careers own worst enemy. The moments when he is in real pain are well acted even if they stink of directorial manipulation.

Most love stories have that one moment of clarity when our two characters realize that they are meant to be together. In One Day these moments happen in almost every year we glimpse the two together. We are constantly shown that these characters want nothing more than to be together but keep getting in their own way. Be it circumstances or timing, Emma and Dexter can never seem to get together. Somehow even when they finally do get together we are unimpressed because we knew it was an inevitability. The entire story comes across as very anticlimactic because there is such an emotional disconnect from the characters it makes it hard for us to care when we are supposed to.

One Day was directed by Lone Scherfig whose critically over praised, An Education, was one of my least favorite Oscar films of 2009. An Education was a well made period piece that I found tedious and dull. So it is not surprising that I found much of One Day to be equally well made but just as equally tedious.

Overall I was disappointed by the movie. I wanted a sweeping love story that spanned decades, and took my breath away. What I got was a passionless, and monotonous tale of two co-dependent people who couldn't be honest with each other or themselves. The real tragedy of the story isn't the love story, but the fact that nobody cares.