Friends With Benefits (2011) **/*****
Every once in a while a director comes along who makes movies that tickle everyone else’s fancies but mine. I’ve never found Woody Allen’s comedies to be as legendary as everyone else does. I don’t think Scorsese’s classic period is as good as everyone else does. On some level, what they do just doesn’t speak to me the same way that it does to other people. It’s starting to seem like, on a smaller scale, Will Gluck is one of those directors for me. Being an Emma Stone fan I was kind of looking forward to last year’s Easy A. It looked like it had some potential to be an under the radar teen movie. And when it came out, everyone seemed to think that it was just that. I heard a lot of praise about what a diamond in the rough it was. Me, I thought it was smug and pretentious; a shallow teen movie that believed too much in its own cleverness. Watching Gluck’s new film Friends With Benefits gave me exactly the same reaction. I think a lot of people will be calling this one of the most smart and refreshing romantic comedies to come out in a while. For me, it just felt masturbatory in the way it hid its shallowness with jokey, Meta deconstruction.
The jokes are constant, delivered rapid fire. The characters don’t so much trade dialogue as they quip at each other. That might be okay if the barbs being traded were hysterical, but here they’re not. Every once in a while a one liner hits, but the sheer multitude of them that get thrown out there and fail ruins the comedic batting average. When one in five jokes are successful, it starts to feel like the movie you’re watching is trying too hard. And that’s uncomfortable to sit through. Don’t get me wrong though, when the movie hits, it’s pretty charming. I liked the bits about George Clooney being the friends with benefits guru, there’s a sneezing gag that was pretty funny, there’s an ongoing bit about being bad at math that got to me, but for every one of those there were four eye rollers.
The main conceit of this film, that two single people attempt to have a sexual relationship without involving emotions or the typical trappings of dating, is one that has famously already been explored in this year’s very similar No Strings Attached. A lot of people are incredulous at the similarities between the two movies; but they wouldn’t have been a problem as long as this one had good characters and told its story in an engaging way. Unfortunately, the entire basis of this movie existing seems to be the oh-so-clever but oh-so-unoriginal conceit of watching two young people have an untraditional relationship. Other than that, it feels undercooked.
The best thing it has going for it is the leads. Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis are big stars, good actors, and are both ridiculously attractive. When put up against No Strings Attached, which had a bad-at-comedy Natalie Portman and a generally awful Ashton Kutcher, this film wins hands down. Kunis especially knocks everything out of the park and is leagues better than the script she is given to work with. Timberlake is a bit spotty, he comes off as uncomfortable in a couple of the dramatic scenes, but he’s a big enough presence to make up for it. They both deserve better. The other big presence in the film is Woody Harrelson as the gay Sports Editor working under Timberlake at his new job. He throws himself into the role with typical Harrelson aplomb, but that means delivering all of his cheeky, super-comfortable-with-being-gay dialogue through a big, shit-eating grin. Harrelson seems to have bought into the cleverness of the script, but nobody clued him in that cleverness is never palatable when paired with smugness. Especially when said, supposedly clever dialogue amounts to little more than talking about wieners. Patricia Clarkson also shows up in the film as the Kunis character’s filthy mother, and she’s good for a few laughs, but she’s playing the same free spirit, inappropriate comment making mother that she did in Easy A. It’s only taken two movies for me to get tired of it and start wishing she’d stick to more serious roles.
Despite the fact that the lead actors were the right choices for the characters, Friends With Benefits suffers because it never gives them anything interesting to do. Much of the first act is a bland tour of New York hot spots. The second act drags along as you watch aimless people go on dates. And then the third act rushes conflict and a climax into what has been to that point a very lackadaisical film. What Friends With Benefits mainly concerns itself with is privileged white people in fabulous settings doing fabulous things. At some point Hollywood has settled on the idea that this is what sells, and it’s all we get in romantic comedies. How about real people, with real problems, trying to figure out real relationships? Does anybody think that might be an interesting thing to base a movie on? No? Oh well.
The characters in this film have reached all of their goals, they are struggling towards nothing, and there is no conflict in the plot to be seen. We’re expected to be enthralled watching them just because of how attractive they are. That may work for the magazine photo spreads that Timberlake’s character edits, but for a narrative film it ends up feeling pretty hollow. And the only thing offered to break the tedium is a series of humorously staged sex scenes. If that is your bag, then you might be okay, but to me the humorously awkward sex scene has become the fart joke of the last five years. I could really do without their obvious punch lines and PG-13, stunt-butt nudity.
If, unlike me, you find the dialogue that Gluck is drawn to delightful rather than indulgent, then perhaps you will have no problems with this film. But I wouldn’t recommend it regardless. Friends With Benefits has problems that don’t end there. Whenever the dialogue stops being clever and starts getting real the results are clunky and embarrassing, i.e. characters very bluntly and ham-handedly talking very pointedly about their feelings. Numerous “hip” and “now” elements sneak into the script. Between TV and movies, this is about the 100th time that some studio executive has squeezed the concept of flash mobs into a script, as if they were the person who discovered them. There’s plenty of ironic commentary about the tropes of your typical romantic comedy and how familiar the main characters are with them. But then Timberlake and Kunis’ characters very systematically cycle through every rom-com cliché themselves on their way to inevitable romantic bliss. Just having your characters acknowledge that what they’re doing is well worn in a Meta way doesn’t make up for the fact that you’ve come up with nothing original. Friends With Benefits wants you to think that it’s out of the ordinary, but ultimately it’s the same tired dog and pony show that everybody else has been dragging out for years. Recommendation to skip, unless you’re particularly taken with Timberlake or Kunis.
