Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney are good company and Sydney Harbour looks well in the sun, but Will Gluck’s comedy runs on schemes instead of jokes, and we came out fond of two people and unable to quote either of them.
Will Gluck directs and co-writes, with Ilana Wolpert, a romantic comedy that takes the shape of Much Ado About Nothing and moves it to a wedding in Sydney. Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and Ben (Glen Powell) meet in a coffee shop, talk all night and part on a misunderstanding. Six months later they are at the same wedding, her sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) marrying Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), the sister of his friend Pete (GaTa), and both families decide the two of them should be together. To get everyone off their backs, they pretend they already are. It is a plot a good many comedies have used, and this one knows exactly where it is going. It is pleasant to look at and easy to sit through, and an hour after it ended we could not remember a single line.
Powell is the reason it works when it works. He plays Ben as a man performing confidence and glancing round to see whether anyone bought it, and he is at his best when the film humiliates him, which it does often and with some invention. Sweeney has the harder part. Bea is written as a woman who does not know what she wants, and Sweeney plays her guarded, sometimes to the point of blankness. But when the two of them are alone, and the script stops making them insult each other for a minute, something real happens between them. The shouting is the weakest thing they do together and the quiet is the strongest.
We laughed, out loud, at a scene on a beach in which Ben has to take off his trousers in front of both families and Powell plays it as if he were closing a deal. Then we noticed the film had gone twenty minutes without another laugh, and that the twenty minutes had been spent on a plan. That is the trouble with Gluck and Wolpert’s script. Every scene exists to push a pretence forward or trip it up, and the people in it say what the plot needs, in the order the plot needs it. The jokes are situations rather than lines, and when a situation ends there is nothing left over.
The supporting cast are given one note each. Dermot Mulroney and Rachel Griffiths, as Bea’s parents, have a running gag and not much else. Robinson and Shipp, whose wedding this is, are the least developed pair in a film about their wedding. Steven Jones-Evans’s production design gives them a house above the harbour with glass on three sides, Amelia Gebler dresses everyone in linen and swimwear, and Danny Ruhlmann shoots it all in a bright, even light in which nothing is ever in shadow. Every frame could sell a holiday. Very little of it is doing anything else.
Tia Nolan and Kimberly Boritz hold the film to 103 minutes and it still sags in the middle, where a boat, a walk and a party follow one another without the pretence getting any more complicated. Christopher Stracey, Leslie Powell and Este Haim supply a score that mostly steps aside for pop cues. The best of these is a song Ben uses to calm himself, which becomes the film’s one running joke, and the film is at its most relaxed whenever it turns up.
Gluck’s Easy A, from 2010, had a lead who could talk her way out of anything and a script that let her. Here the talk is plot, and the leads are left to be charming in the gaps, which they are. Against the sunny studio romantic comedies it plainly wants to sit beside, this has the stars, the sea and the light, and not the writing.
Watch it on a sofa with somebody whose company you like. The film is decent company itself, and that is about the size of it. The 15 certificate is for the language and the beach.
