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Going the Distance is a romantic comedy, and the experience of watching it could be likened to one of the most boring conversations you’ve ever had in your life.
Your eyes are glazing over but the person talking to you insists on droning on for another ninety minutes, which guarantees the next time you see them you’ll be long gone and perhaps this is something Miss Barrymore should think about the next time she gets offered a sub-standard script.
Garrett (Justin Long) gets dumped by his girlfriend because he doesn’t buy her a birthday gift. He joins his two friends at a local bar who inform him that the real problem is his commitment issue.
Meanwhile, Erin (Drew Barrymore) is in New York for a summer internship. She gets chewed off by her boss and takes off to the nearest bar where she bumps into Garrett. The romance is launched.
Garrett’s character is the first casualty of this rom-com disaster. Not buying your girlfriend a birthday gift is thoughtless but has nothing to do with commitment, so Garrett isn’t even established as a stereotype and this is pretty hopeless writing.
Our hero then happily sails into a relationship with Erin, insists on staying in touch when she leaves for San Francisco and commits himself to monogamy without so much as a murmur, which removes all conflict in one swipe and leaves us with a lot of ‘filler’ scenes, one particularly ridiculous one of which is in a spray-tan booth which we saw in Friends fifteen years ago. And it never gets any better than that.
Erin is equally wishy-washy. Her issues are really not clear, but she does inform Garrett that she made the mistake of giving up her chance of a career to devote herself to her last boyfriend, but then when she has to choose between a job or her new boyfriend, she chooses Garrett; because the film is so ambiguous we have no idea if this is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing.
And if you were lodging with your married sister, would you really take your boyfriend home and dive onto the dining room table to have sex? And would your brother-in-law really be eating his dinner on the same table, in the dark? And that’s as contrived as it gets.
There are some painful moments in this film, one in particular is when Barrymore has to respond to Justin’s “I’m crazy about you†with a “And I’m crazy about you, tooâ€. She doesn’t seem able to take this clichéd line seriously, and comes over as glib.
While this human moment entertained me, for a story to work it has to be, above all else, sincere, and we really do expect our actors to be able to fake that.
RELEASE DATES
UK 27 August 2010
USA September 2010