One Day
Time Out New York Project: Issue #825, August 18-24, 2011
★★☆☆☆
Dir. Lone Scherfig. 2011. PG-13. 108mins. Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Patricia Clarkson.
July 15: The day, in 1910, when Alzheimer’s disease was publicly named. The day, in 1606, when the Dutch painter Rembrandt was born. The day, in 1988, when British college students Emma (Hathaway) and Dexter (Sturgess) have a meet-cute that shakes the very foundations of the universe! Yeah, okay, not really. Their early-morning sorta-hookup is merely the reasonably charming curtain-raiser to Lone Scherfig’s ridiculously contrived weepie, which checks in with Emma and Dexter each July 15 of their lives, from the year of Roger Rabbit to the present annum.
What happens on the ides of summer ranges from mundane (Dex helps Emma move into her first apartment) to momentous (Dex’s mother, played by the always-welcome Patricia Clarkson, wastes away from the big C). But Scherfig, working from a script by David Nicholls, who adapted his own novel, infuses every dramatic incident with the same level of watery-eyed, something-bad’s-gonna-happen portent. Sturgess and Hathaway have an undeniable chemistry that at least holds our interest and at most charms us into stargazing submission (there’s a beautifully awkward erotic moment on a beach). But that all sours by the time of the film’s “shocking” climax, which is so hilariously telegraphed, it plays like a Benny Hill gag rather than a tear-duct stoker.—Keith Uhlich
