How do you deal with love-at-first-sight in a romantic comedy?
It's a notion we're all in love with, but it's cinematic death to know who belongs with whom by the end of the first act.
In Definitely, Maybe, Toronto-born writer-director Adam Brooks (scripter of rom-coms such as Wimbledon and French Kiss) thinks he has an exit-strategy/plot-contrivance in the form of a veritable police lineup of possible matches -- our hero Will (Ryan Reynolds) and three babes from his past, only one of whom is "the one" as told in flashback.
The audience for his tale -- as you probably know from the trailers -- is his 9-year-old daughter Maya from his recently-broken marriage (Oscar nominated adorable kid Abigail Breslin of Little Miss Sunshine fame).
Maya comes home one day from a sex-ed class with all kinds of uncomfortable questions, which segue into uncomfortable questions about how Will met Maya's mother (never mind that there's already a sitcom with this premise that's better than this movie).
So Will tells the story of three women in his life -- his picket-fence-minded college sweetheart Emily (Elizabeth Banks), a ferociously career-minded journalist (Rachel Weisz) and a lovable, nomadic flake named April (Isla Fisher).
It's a pretty tall order to believe that a little girl -- especially one as precocious as Maya -- wouldn't recognize her own mother from three such wildly different female archetypes. But suspending your disbelief is your only entree to this decade-spanning tale of how Will comes to New York to work on the Bill Clinton campaign and, between bimbo explosions and his own disaster-prone love life, loses the idealism that brought him there in the first place.
The problem with this romantic "whodunnit" is that Brooks maintains his grip on one hoary old rom-com chestnut -- whoever "meets cutest" is destined to be together.
That happens early and, yes, the mystery is thus no mystery at all, despite all the permutations of who's-with-who and who's available at any given time (the movie's underlying message is that it's not "who," but "when" that determines your match, which is sensible enough.)
When the "mystery mother" tale is finally told, what's left is a pro-active last act in which a major betrayal is glossed over with a hokey line, and the amperage of Breslin's cuteness is jacked up as if to distract us from all the contrivance that finally ties up this movie.
Without her, there almost literally is no movie. Nobody except Maya is set up to be all that sympathetic (April's flakiness is appealing at the beginning, but its charm has a limited half-life). Weisz's character is particularly self-obsessed (plus her romantic loyalties are divided between Will and a grouchy author, played by a scene-stealing Kevin Kline, whose charisma reminds us of the pieces that are still missing in Reynolds' calculated progression to Hollywood leading man.)
What we're left with is a mildly entertaining rom-com with obvious flaws, with nowhere near the out-of-the-candy-box approach to romance it purports to have.
(This film is rated PG)
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