Going the Distance

It's obvious that first-time screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe has studied the Judd Apatow formula well for his romantic comedy, Going the Distance. Like Apatow's films, LaTulippe tries to blend sweet romantic comedy conventions, with raunchy frat-boy humor. It's a tricky balance, and one that has worked well in films like The 40-Year Old Virgin or Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But the approach that is employed here came across as kind of off putting to me.

That's because for the most part, Going the Distance is a perfectly standard and fairly mediocre romantic comedy. It's sweet, and I smiled a couple times, but I couldn't get involved in the central romantic couple of Erin (Drew Barrymore) and Garrett (Justin Long). The shock humor that the movie throws in almost seems to be shoehorned in there. It's like the filmmakers knew they needed something to grab the audience's attention, so they threw in a bunch of four letter words, and jokes about masturbation, dry humping, getting high, and phone sex. I have no doubt that these jokes could work in a movie like this, but they would need to be in a more confident screenplay. This often comes across as a jumbled and lazy one that doesn't know if it wants to stick to the rules of the genre, or break free of them.

The film opens as many romantic comedies do, introducing us to two young people who are unlucky in life and relationships. Garrett is a guy who works for a small time music company, is assigned to handle bands he has no interest in, and breaks up with his girlfriend in an opening scene that is both contrived and groan-inducing. Erin is a woman who wants to break into the newspaper business, and is working as an intern at a local paper. Her boss at the paper doesn't seem the slightest bit interested in her, and makes no effort to hide it, but she is oblivious to this somehow, and still thinks they will hire her full time someday. One of the problems with Erin's character that I had is that she is written too young. It sounds like she was originally written as being younger, but when Barrymore became interested in the script, they switched a few things around. It still seems awkward. I was also disappointed that the early scenes depicting Garrett's job set up some opportunities for satire in the music world, only to do nothing with it.

The two have a meet cute at a bar as they bond over the classic arcade game, Centipede. They go to his home, and have an evening of further bonding over using a bong and talking about Top Gun. It's here that we also meet Garrett's two best friends, Dan (Charlie Day) and Box (Jason Sudeikis). Dan is also Garrett's roommate, and there's a running gag that the walls in their apartment is so thin, he can hear everything that Garrett and Erin are saying. So, when they try to get romantic, Dan starts playing appropriate music from his room. This was sort of funny. I also liked his observation that you never see baby pigeons in New York City, which is something I never thought of. Day and Sudeikis get a couple laughs, but their characters serve no real point to the screenplay. They hang around the main characters, make some off-color sex jokes, but never take an active role in the plot.

Speaking of the plot (such as it is), Garrett and Erin are starting to fall in love with each other, as evidenced by the montages they share together. However, Erin's internship at the newspaper is going to end, and she's going to have to live in San Francisco with her sister (Christina Applegate) and her family. The two try to break it off, but decide they don't want to be apart from each other, so decide to give a long distance relationship a try. This is the movie's central hook, and it's a good one. It's been said that in our current tech society, there are more long distance relationships than ever before, so it's surprising it's taken so long for Hollywood to take advantage of it. The problem here is that the relationship between Garrett and Erin is unconvincing. While Long and Barrymore have some chemistry together (they should, having dated off and on in real life), their relationship never really builds. Instead, we get a bunch of contrived situations including misunderstandings, questions as to whether one is cheating on the other, and tired physical gags about spray tanning.

With a more honest approach, Going the Distance could have worked. But director Nanette Burstein (a documentary filmmaker making her mainstream debut) instead goes for the contrived and forced shock value. There's a particularly icky sequence where Garrett and Erin, having been reunited for the first time in months, immediately return to her home, take off their clothes, and begin having sex on her sister's dining room table, unaware that the sister's husband (Jim Gaggigan) is eating at the table, watching them. This is followed by a scene where the sister is cleaning the table, and picking pubic hairs off of it. Maybe this could have been funny, but the movie kills the joke by dragging it out even further, with the family having Thanksgiving dinner at the same table, and numerous close ups of the sister's nervous face every time someone's food rolls off their plate onto the surface of the table (ho, ho).

Like I said at the beginning, sex humor and romantic comedy conventions can work together, but there is a certain uninspired and forced nature to the combination here. The jokes often fall flat, and I was not involved in the slightest by the central couple, so it did not take long for me to lose interest. On top of that, the film seems unnecessarily padded as each forced and contrived problem the couple face pops up. Going the Distance seems too long, and usually seems to have no idea where it's going in the first place.

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