40 Days and 40 Nights

Michael Lehmann’s 40 Days and 40 Nights has one idea, and it is a decent one. Rob Perez’s script gives Matt (Josh Hartnett), a San Francisco web designer, a broken heart and a remedy: he will give up sex for Lent, all of it, and see whether he feels better. The film states this in its first quarter of an hour, which is about right, and then has the rest of its 94 minutes to fill. It fills roughly half of them.

Shannyn Sossamon is the reason the romance works at all. Her Erica meets Matt over a washing machine and treats him, correctly, as a slightly odd man who needs watching. She plays everything a beat slower than the people around her, and the film calms down whenever she is on screen. The best scene is a quiet one in his flat in which Matt, forbidden to touch her, uses a single flower instead, and nobody takes anything off. Elliot Davis lights it low and warm, Rolfe Kent keeps the music to almost nothing, and for four or five minutes the film is tender and funny at the same time. We were moved, a little, and surprised to be.

The trouble is Hartnett. He is a brooder by instrument, good at standing in doorways looking troubled, and farce asks him to run, twitch, sweat and shout. He does all of it as if under instruction. The running gag, that celibacy makes him see bare breasts wherever he looks, in the street and across the office, needs a man who can do panic with his face, and Hartnett’s face does one thing. Most critics have said he is miscast and we agree, though we would put the blame higher up. Lehmann made Heathers in 1988 and knew exactly what to do with a cold lead; here he has cast one in a part written for a warm one.

The office is where the film gets its laughs, and most of them belong to the women. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Sam follows the sweepstake with the air of someone who has already spent the winnings, and she gets more out of a raised eyebrow than Paulo Costanzo gets out of a whole speech. Costanzo’s Ryan, the flatmate who cannot stop talking about sex, is written loud and played louder, and we had tired of him by his third scene. Griffin Dunne’s boss Jerry Anderson wanders in for a couple of good lines and wanders out. Vinessa Shaw has the thankless job of being the ex, and the script gives her nothing to do but come back.

Elliot Davis shoots San Francisco in clean, bright daylight, white walls and blue sky, and Sharon Seymour’s dot-com office, exposed brick and half-empty desks, is the most convincing thing in the film; you believe people are paid to sit in it and do little. Jill M. Ohanneson puts Erica in jumble-sale cardigans and everyone else in clothes from the same catalogue, which is a small, correct joke. Nicholas C. Smith cuts briskly when the film needs it and mercilessly when it does not; the fantasy sequences are chopped as fast as a trailer, and Lehmann’s crash zooms onto every reaction are what a director reaches for when he does not trust the line.

The last twenty minutes take a turn we will not describe, except to say that the film pays off its premise with a scene it plainly thinks is funny and we found ugly, and then asks us to forgive everyone involved inside about ninety seconds. We sat through it feeling faintly sick, then cross, because a comedy about a man learning to want less had just shown it did not believe its own idea. The 15 certificate is there for the jokes, not for that scene, which is the wrong way round.

Against the teen sex comedies of its moment it is gentler and better dressed. Against the romantic comedy proper it is thin: one idea, one good scene with a flower, and a lead who looks as though he would rather be somewhere darker. If sunshine, San Francisco and Sossamon are enough for an evening, there are worse ways to spend 94 minutes, and most of them are longer. Watch it at home, where it is easier to step out when the ending arrives, and we would.