If you are looking for the kind of film that the whole family can watch with shared laughs, tears and warm fuzzies, consider your search over. Marley & Me hits almost everything right to entertain almost any family imaginable. It avoids virtually every pitfall plaguing the kids & family genre without resorting to crassness or sarcasm. In other words, this film is simply excellent.
After moving to Florida, John and Jenny Grogan (Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston) adopt a puppy to see if they’re ready for the responsibilities of parenthood. The dog, Marley, proves to be every bit a whirlwind as life itself. Through the years, and many ups and downs, Marley is the Grogan’s constant companion and provides John with material for his weekly column. The column and the dog both become objects of devotion, praise, scorn, and frustration as life passes by.
This film could have been incredibly tacky, cheesy and eye-roll inducing. Does it have a few predictable moments? Yes, but not as many as you might expect. The story itself is something that sounds dead-on like a Hallmark Channel movie of the week featuring second-rate talent creaking their way through a stiff but emotionally manipulative script. That Marley & Me is none of these things is incredibly refreshing.
Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson have wonderful chemistry and are acting well within their abilities. The writing (based on a true story) never strays too far out of the bounds of reality. It gets appropriately silly sometimes, which may not cater well to the cynical and uber-serious crowds, and matches the ebb and flow of real life pretty darn well. The restraint required to avoid cutesy clichés is hefty and I think it may even weigh on the pace just a bit.
One note of caution is that Marley & Me contains some mature content. Most of it will go over the heads of the youngest viewers but tweens and teens will understand it. There’s some implied sexuality and even an instance of skinny-dipping- pretty surprising stuff for a PG film. One thing I’m not crazy about is the swearing. Is it necessary to drop the s-bomb in a film marketed to young children? I think not. The cursing isn’t a deal breaker, though, because there is enough charm and heart in this film to move you past those few isolated incidents pretty quickly.
There’s nothing technically impressive about this film but Marley & Me is an absolute charmer. It’s emotionally honest about married life, parenthood, and pet ownership without resorting to forcing emotional cues. The issues faced within the reels aren’t sugar-coated or watered-down for easy consumption. While it may seem that this film caters toward dog-owners, it plays well to anyone who has ever owned a pet before. This is just part of the family-movie magic inherent to this film.
While waiting for this film to entertain me, the darndest thing happened- the credits rolled. That’s my cynical take on Adam Sandler’s first “comedic” offering in 2011. A more balanced approach would go something like this: Just Go with It is an uninspired film suffering from lazy writing and made worse by performances by all but one of its stars.
Adam Sandler stars as Danny, a plastic surgeon in LA. When picking up girls, he pretends to be stuck in an unhappy marriage. Lo and behold, Danny finally meets “the one”- Palmer (Brooklyn Decker). Trouble is, she doesn’t want to be any part of what she thinks is adultery. Instead of coming clean, Danny tells her he is getting divorced from his wife soon. This leads Danny to go to extremes to sell the ruse. For a fee, he enlists the services of his single-mom receptionist (Jennifer Aniston) and her kids, but gets much more than he bargained for.
The first and most critical mistake made here is Danny’s characterization. I know we live in morally ambiguous times but there’s absolutely nothing likeable about a man pretending to be unhappily married to attract women. The fact that he is willing to use a nice woman and her children to that very end is borderline reprehensible. Oh sure, there’s a good natured twist at the end of it all but that ending is so obvious from the start that the journey is hardly worthy of the final destination.
The script is full of the kind of situational gags, physical comedy and toilet humor Sandler fans have come to expect. Sandler, however, appears to run on autopilot through the entire film. It’s hard to tell if he is bored with the film or if he’s forgotten that it takes effort (not just his presence) to produce comedy. In her first film role, it is clear that Brooklyn Decker is more accustomed to strutting around in bikinis than acting. Paper-thin as her character may be, Decker fails to do more than look pretty.
Jennifer Aniston, however, saves the film. Instead of trapping herself in the confines of romantic comedies and roles too serious for audiences to accept her in, Aniston lets her hair down and seems to be having a ball here. Her character’s frustration with Sandler brings out the best from her natural sass and charm. She gets and delivers the best lines in the film.
Despite Aniston’s best efforts, Just Go with It falls flat. Having made his millions already and ventured into more challenging roles recently, it seems Sandler is content to ride the coattails of his own success here. Unfortunately for him, the fact that he is in the film does not automatically make it funny. Aniston’s solid performance cannot win out over Sandler’s weak performance and Decker’s non-performance, leaving you with only a couple of giggles and an occasional chuckle, but never any hearty laughs. This is simply not acceptable from a comedy.
Despite my long-standing feud with the chick flick genre, I refuse to give in to the desire to use the un-clever and obvious comment that this film’s title sets itself up for. If you’re thinking of popping in a heart-warming and mushy romantic comedy, this is not the film you want. Sure, there’s plenty of fluff, but this is a sunny path with plenty of rocks in it.
The hub of this ensemble is Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin), a slightly scatterbrained single who reads far too much into the actions and words of the men she dates. She’s in love with the idea of being in love and is repeatedly crushed when things don’t work out the way she thought. An off-the cuff conversation with a bartender named Alex (Justin Long) leads to an odd friendship. Alex tells it like it is and illuminates Gigi to how guys work when they are or are not into a girl. This leads to Gigi constantly calling Alex for advice in a variety of situations.
Alex’s friend Connor (Kevin Connolly) is the exact opposite. He’s hung up solely on his long-time best friend Anna (Scarlett Johansson) but is afraid to tell her how he feels about her. She’s not into him in quite that way. Anna also happens to be in the early stages of an affair with Ben (Bradley Cooper), who is married to Gigi’s co-worker Janine (Jennifer Connelly). Their marriage is on rocky grounds to start but Janine is desperate to try and save it. Between Gigi’s new intel on how men avoid commitment and Janine’s desperation, their co-worker Beth (Jennifer Aniston) decides to break up with her marriage-phobic boyfriend Neil (Ben Affleck).
As you can tell, there is an awful lot going on at one time in this film. Bouncing back and forth between the storylines doesn’t give you whiplash but it certainly makes for a frustrating viewing experience. Gigi and Alex are fun to watch because Alex is almost always spot on with his observations about men and desperate single women. Gigi on her own is a tad annoying though. The slow destruction of Janine and Ben’s marriage is powerful but not exactly pleasant to watch, what with all the fluff the other sub-plots hold. Conner and Anna are equally tough to watch because he’s such a stoop for a girl who will probably never reciprocate. Finally, Beth and Neil serve little purpose whatsoever other than to add commentary about long-term, unmarried couples.
If the point of the film is merely to make observations about a select few relationship scenarios, then it succeeds. But, if that is the case, then it’s a pretty cheap way to provide entertainment and the construct is absurd. It’s bad enough that there are eight main characters plus Drew Barrymore thrown in to boot. This forces He’s Just Not That Into You is forced to split up its 129-minute run time a little too much. Some characters are more developed, leaving others feeling flat and (as with Beth and Neil) mostly unnecessary.
Part of me wants to blast the film for having all of the characters connected in one way or another but I loved both Magnolia and Crash, which use a similar six-degrees-of-separation approach to tell an engrossing story. Perhaps it’s the genre in general or the fact that some of the characters turned me off that prevented me from being fully engaged in the story. All I can really say is that this film lacks that special quality that successful ensemble films possess.
Women are the target audience for this film. I am positive of that. With that in mind, it will likely strike a chord with a lot of women who have been through frustrating and uncertain relationship. Men will enjoy the film for Alex’s spot-on assessment of relationship but they will also cringe at the chick-flick cop-out that comes at the end.
He’s Just Not That Into You suffers from trying to hit too many issues. It probably needs another hour for all the characters to truly develop properly but who would really want to watch a three-hour chick flick? I sure don’t. Despite some clever dialog spread throughout, there isn’t much special about this film and its sugary, chick-flick marketing betrays the emotional darkness that lies within its reels.
