Love and other impossible pursuits

Emilia- Natalie Portman
Carolyne- Lisa Kudrow
Jack- Scott Cohen
Simon- Anthony Rapp
Director: Don Roos
Writers: Don Roos (screenplay)
Ayelet Waldman (novel)

This film is what I like to call “genre confused.” The story is set up perfectly to provide the audience with one hundred and two minutes of mushy gushy, lovey dovey romantic drama. The film bases its story on Ayelet Waldman’s bestselling novel by the same name. The description of the plot on IMDB says the film is about a young woman trying to recover her broken marriage through a relationship with her stepson. That sounds sweet and romantic, right? However, Love and other impossible pursuits is about so much more (and less) than that. With the characters possibly being more and the plot being less. The film is actually about a young woman (Emilia) who sleeps with a married man (Jack) who neglects his young son to spend time with his mistress. Then Emilia gets pregnant with Jack’s child. She tells him about the baby over dinner after some cliché lines about not being able to leave his wife because of his reputation. But when Emilia tells Jack about the baby he drops everything to marry her. You’re probably thinking, “but doesn’t Jack have a son with the woman he is already married to?” Why yes he does, and this is the first example of perfectly good characters, who are horrible people, being placed in a mushy gushy, lovey dovey romantic drama instead of a dark comedy/drama where they belong. This is where the genre confusion begins. The problem with this film is that the characters are more realistic than the plot allows them to be. Romance films don’t usually allow much room for realism because meet-cutes, passionate sex scenes, and clichés take up all the space. In a darker film, the characters could fully embrace their self-centered qualities and the story would feel less mapped out and pre-planned. The story would flow naturally because it wouldn’t be confined to the structure of most romance genre films.
The film’s director, Don Roos, makes his characters shuffle through a phony love story where they try to be the people we love in all those other romance movies and novels but that’s not who they are. When Jack and Emilia talked about their love for one another or their stepson, it feels insincere. They are only saying what they have to in order for the plot to move forward. Jack is every other older married man who is seeing another woman. He is unhappy in his marriage. He loves his son but doesn’t pay him much attention and treats his first wife like crap. Emilia is every other young mistress seeing a married man. She wants to form a life with him with the wife out of the picture. They both have sour intentions and say they love each other but don’t show it. Yet the movie still pushes Jack and Emilia in a forced loving relationship that the audience is supposed to root for.
As far as I can tell, the characters in this movie would rather be doing what normal, emotional, real people would do in similar circumstances. Jack would rather just sleep with Emilia and leave it at that, Emilia would rather have Jack to herself, minus the wife and kid, Carolyne would rather do away with Emilia and keep her old life, and I’m sure the stepson would rather have a new life all together. The best scene in the film is when Jack and Emilia are arguing about their relationship. Jack tells Emilia that she only loves him because he reminds her of her father. Her father cheated on her mother and left her for another woman. He tells her how they fell in love under horrible circumstances and for the wrong reasons. In this short scene, the characters finally tell the truth about themselves. They scream at each other (and to the audience) who they really are yet the story still continues on its genre driven path. The scene soon goes from revealing right back to cliché when Emilia brings up the death of their baby. Now that I think about it, their dead child might have just been a ploy to make us feel sorry for the characters (since their own behavior doesn’t bring about any sympathy).
This film didn’t work for me because love between characters is central to the plot of a romance film and I don’t think these characters love one another. I think they loved themselves, a lot, but that isn’t what the film’s goal was. The film wanted to tell the story of a woman’s relationship with her husband and stepson but it is so busy trying to romanticize serious moments that the major theme is lost. The characters would have fit better in a different movie and the plot would have been better with less sarcastic, selfish characters. I would recommend this film to anyone who really loves Natalie Portman or enjoyed Ayelet Waldman’s novel. To everyone else, I would recommend seeing a movie that is sure of what it is and who its characters are.