Max Barbakow’s time-loop comedy is quick, funny and better company than most of its kind, and Cristin Milioti gives it a spine Andy Samberg’s slacker cannot. The physics do not bear looking at, and the last stretch hands her story back to him.
Max Barbakow takes the idea of Groundhog Day and moves it to a wedding in the desert, and the smartest thing Andy Siara’s script does is to begin with a man who has already given up. Nyles (Andy Samberg) has been living the same wedding day for longer than he can count when the film starts. The film does not make us sit through him learning the rules; it lets Sarah (Cristin Milioti) learn them, and lets us watch him watch her. It is quick, funny and better company than most comedies of its size, and we recommend it, with two reservations we will come to.
Quyen Tran shoots the desert as a place where the light does nothing but glare. The sky is bleached almost white, the pool is a chemical blue, and the reception at night is all strings of bulbs against a black sky. Jason Kisvarday’s resort is white walls, sunloungers and a bar that never runs dry. Colin Wilkes puts Nyles in a Hawaiian shirt and yellow board shorts for a ceremony everybody else has dressed for, and the joke is that after enough days nobody has the energy to be embarrassed. Matthew Compton’s score keeps out of the way. Andrew Dickler and Matt Friedman cut the repeated mornings hard, so the loop lands as a rhythm before anybody has explained it.
Samberg is doing something more careful than usual. Nyles has stopped wanting anything, and Samberg plays him as pleasant, agreeable and slightly dead behind the eyes, a man who has tried every drink, every bed and every roof in Palm Springs and found none of them worth a second go. The speech he gives at the reception in the first act, in that shirt, is the funniest scene in the film because it is sincere and he knows it will be gone by morning. We laughed at it, and then felt uneasy, because Samberg lets you see that he has given it many times and has stopped hearing the words.
Milioti is the reason to watch. Sarah is the family’s black sheep, drinking through her sister’s wedding so as not to think, and Milioti plays the discovery of the loop as panic before it becomes a game. The stretch where the two of them decide to enjoy themselves, stealing a plane, rehearsing a dance in a dive bar under the eye of Dale Dickey’s barmaid, drinking through a day that cannot end, is the film’s high point, and it works because she is more alive in it than he is. Then she stops playing along. Milioti lets the fun go out of her face a scene before the script catches up with her, and that quiet turn moved us more than we expected from a film that opens with a man floating on an inflatable pizza.
J.K. Simmons arrives with a bow, a quiver and a grievance, and every scene he is in is better for it; his Roy has found a kind of peace and cannot forgive anyone who has not. The mechanics, though, do not bear looking at. Siara’s script gestures at a cave, an earthquake and, later, at something that sounds like physics, and those explanations are the weakest writing in the film. The film also spends an hour making Sarah its engine and then, in the final stretch, hands Nyles the big speech and the big choice, while her own reckoning is settled in a couple of lines. We wanted to see more of it.
Against the loop films it borrows from, it sits a notch below Groundhog Day, which had the nerve to keep its lead unpleasant for an hour, and above most of its imitators. The point here is sadder and truer: a long relationship is the same day repeated with somebody, and you can treat that as a prison or as company.
Watch it on a night when you are not sure what you feel about the person on the sofa next to you. It is 90 minutes long, it is funny for most of them, and it will give you something to argue about afterwards that is not the plot.
