Will Gluck (2011)
In Doris Day vehicles, she is sometimes fancied by a playboy who infuriates her. Marriage isn’t on the cards, let alone sex. In the end, she gives in but also makes an honest man of him: his feelings for her deepen from lust into love, and she loves him back. (The Day character is sometimes a career girl, who comes to realise her true role in life. In Pillow Talk, she starts off as an interior decorator and ends up, we assume, a homemaker.) A time-honoured tradition of romantic comedies more generally is that the principals drive each other mad to start with. They negotiate obstacles and incompatibilities and move from thinking they wouldn’t be seen dead with their sparring partner to understanding that they’re made for each other. The protagonists in this kind of film may well have sex with each other before they fall in love but – except for something like Pretty Woman where the heroine’s a prostitute – they don’t usually have sex on determinedly dispassionate terms. The difficulty and peril of depersonalised sex is a theme you associate with more serious movies, ranging from the genuinely tragic (Last Tango in Paris) to mawkish soft porn (Love & Other Drugs). There are also romcoms about friends who fall in love and/or into bed with each without fully intending to, and who complicate their relationship when they do.
I didn’t even realise until I looked up Will Gluck’s film on Wikipedia that ‘Friends with benefits is a term used to describe non-exclusive recurring sexual (or near-sexual) relationships …’ It’s probably just ignorance that makes me think this movie, with a screenplay by Keith Merryman and David A Newman, arranges the essential elements of romantic comedy – love, hate, like and sex – in a formally original way. In Friends with Benefits, Dylan and Jamie meet through work. Jamie is employed by a firm of headhunters in New York and meets Dylan when he comes to be interviewed for the job of art director on GQ magazine: he’s become well known through his work for a highly successful internet company in Los Angeles and he gets the job. They become friends and then decide to start a sexual relationship but with no ‘emotion’ involved (as if being friends didn’t already involve emotions). Members of their families stand corrected when they assume the pair are an item: Jamie tells her mother she doesn’t like Dylan ‘that way’; he insists the same about Jamie to his sister.
The structure of Friends with Benefits removes the agreeable suspense of romantic comedy. This can be masochistically enjoyable (in Working Girl, for example – where, many years on from Doris Day, the heroine gets both the leading man and a high-powered corporate executive job). You know things will turn out right but it’s amusing being made to feel the happy ending’s in jeopardy. The opening cross-cutting in this new film is designed to make us think that Dylan and Jamie are already a couple and about to break up with each other. It’s then revealed there’s no connection between them at this stage, except that they’re both about to be ditched by (improbable) partners. We’re meant to believe that it’s largely because they’re hurting from the ending of these relationships that Dylan and Jamie are attracted by the no-strings arrangement. At first, they’re both such smartarses and so primed for hedonism that it’s impossible to believe they need to escape from ‘committed’ liaisons. The only slight element of suspense in Friends with Benefits is whether either Justin Timberlake (Dylan) or Mila Kunis (Jamie) will be able to suggest any of the emotional depth that will surely be required in due course: we come to see that both Dylan and Jamie are somewhat messed up and somehow vulnerable.
I’m not sure how much the actors do succeed in this – but Mila Kunis is the more successful. She’s annoying throughout the first half of the film – as a comedienne she’s distinctly short of charm – yet she becomes moderately convincing as someone who uses combative fast-talking as a shield. Justin Timberlake is undoubtedly talented but his thin, foxy features give him a mean-spirited shallowness that persists throughout. David Fincher used this quality effectively (if obviously) in The Social Network but so far I’ve liked Timberlake best in his role in Bad Teacher, where he was cast against physical type. Still, both he and Kunis show enough here to make me want to see them again. But not as much as I look forward to what Richard Jenkins does next. He gave the finest supporting performance of 2010 in one of the year’s worst films, Eat Pray Love. As Dylan’s father-with-Alzheimer’s, Jenkins capsizes the vessel of shrivelled calculation that is Friends with Benefits into momentarily deep waters. He brought tears to my eyes here as both the character and as an actor, because he’s so good and so true. The supporting cast also includes Jenna Elfman as Dylan’s elder sister; Nolan Gould as her son (I did laugh at his first failed attempt at a magic trick but that’s all he’s there for and it soon gets tedious); and Patricia Clarkson, as Jamie’s mother, a superannuated raver left over from ‘the seventies’ (the script is pretty vague about this, given that the mother is meant to be forty-eight now so wouldn’t have reached puberty until well into the decade she’s meant to be belong to). Clarkson rarely gives many shadings to her characters but it’s good to see her so much more at ease here than in One Day.
One of the most tedious aspects of this schema is the weak implication that Dylan and Jamie are both ‘hurting inside’ as some kind of legacy from their parents and the redemptive action that the Jenkins and Clarkson characters take to sort things out. Also crucial to the resolution is the character of Tom, the sports editor on GQ, played by Woody Harrelson. It’s supposed to be comically improbable that this apparently macho man is assertively gay and I guess that’s an improvement on Harrelson being unintentionally implausible in a homosexual role as he was in The Walker. There’s a homophobic current running through the jokes in Friends with Benefits. Dylan and Jamie decide not to risk getting too close and go to Central Park with the intention of finding a new object of desire for each other. She chats up another man (Bryan Greenberg) and, when he asks who her companion is, explains that Dylan is her gay best friend: this is meant to be an appalling insult. Some of the details of Friends with Benefits feel peculiarly modern: when things go wrong between them and Dylan is trying to get back in touch with Jamie, he doesn’t look for her, even though he knows where she lives and works – he just leaves text and voice messages on her phone. Other things are old-fashioned: when Dylan eventually rouses himself to go and find Jamie he deploys a comically spectacular mode of transport (the motorboat that Tom uses to commute).
If two great-looking, professionally successful people enjoy each other’s company, have plenty to talk about, feel able to confide, and have very good sex together, you wonder what it is that’s lacking in their relationship. The feelings Dylan and Jamie are meant not to have for each other are nothing more than a contrived delaying tactic in Friends with Benefits. The delay in their getting to acknowledge these feelings is a good deal more artificial than the postponement of sex in the Doris Day comedies. The makers of this film are smugly self-aware: in one scene, a television in the background is showing Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice; Jamie and Dylan are mildly sarcastic about Nora Ephron and the irrelevantly heartwarming type of song used to score the happy endings of lower-grade romcoms. Will Gluck’s own choice of music demonstrates, however, that he’s no more able than his protagonists to keep his derisive cool.
15 September 2011
