What If

Michael Dowse's What If caused me to have a completely divided reaction.  I liked the two leads, which is always crucial in a romantic comedy, where we want to see them get together by the end.  But, something bothered me.  I think I was admiring the actors playing them, rather than the characters they were playing.  Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that my reaction was divided, as the movie itself seems split right down the middle.  On one hand, it wants to be a quirky romantic comedy where people talk about offbeat things like how much fecal matter Elvis had in his body when he died.  On the other, it also wants to be a crowd pleasing film that is a slave to conventions and cliches.

So, about those lead performances.  Our main couple here is played by Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan.  Radcliffe can be an effortlessly charming young actor, and has long since proved that he has a career far beyond the Harry Potter films ahead of him, both on screen and on the Broadway stage.  Kazan has a very loose and sweet energy here.  She's able to give a pleasant vibe to her performance without sanding off all the edges, giving her just a tiny bit of a wild streak that we can sense hidden beneath her performance.  Both have a lot of charm in their scenes together, and they seem to be making a big effort.  But that's exactly the problem - all I was noticing was the effort.  I felt like they were trying their hardest to rise above the somewhat uneven material they'd been given.  And so, while I liked them, I always had reservations in the back of my mind.

The premise is more or less tied into 1989's When Harry Met Sally, asking the exact same question as to whether a man and a woman can just be friends in a relationship without sexual thoughts getting in the way.  Radcliffe plays Wallace, a med school dropout who has spent the past year moping over his girlfriend cheating on him.  While attending a party, he meets Kazan's character, Chantry - an animator who seems to share Wallace's love for quirky dialogue and reading up on bizarre sandwiches.  There is an instant connection between the two as they talk at the party, and eventually walk to her home together.  That's when Chantry drops the bombshell on Wallace that she has a boyfriend named Ben (Rafe Spall).  They agree to be friends, although we can sense that both want to be more as they spend time together.

From there, What If more or less goes the way we expect.  Ben is called away on business to Ireland, giving Wallace and Chantry plenty of opportunities to spend time together, and get into awkward situations where it seems like they want to get closer together, but cannot.  The movie at times seems to be bending over backwards to have us like these characters.  They get into cute, contrived situations, such as when Chantry is in a dressing room, trying on an outfit that's too small for her, and it gets stuck on over her head.  Wallace has to crawl inside the dressing room, and help her get it off, while secretly admiring her body.  There's also a scene where the two are at a beach late at night, go swimming naked together, and when they go to get their clothes, find out that their best friends have stolen them.  So, Wallace and Chantry must lie in a sleeping bag together naked, and try to keep each other warm.

These kind of situations would be easier to swallow if they didn't feel like they were crammed into the screenplay in order to force a reaction from the audience.  The film is based on a stage play titled Toothpaste and Cigars, and I don't know if these moments were in it.  But to me, it felt like scenes that were inserted to get a better reaction from the audience.  Also forced is the inevitable misunderstanding late in the film, which leads to the two main characters going their separate ways, even though they know they're right for each other.  This is a movie that shifts uncomfortably from dialogue about how a person can eat their own poop and survive, to contrived slapstick, such as when Wallace opens the bathroom door too quickly, and sends Ben the boyfriend falling out the window to a serious injury.  It switches tones from the whimsical (Chantry sees a cartoon version of herself with butterfly wings at times, acting out her inner thoughts) to the standard formula, and it just ends confused..

It's not that I did not like What If, it's that I felt the movie never quite got a handle of what it wanted to be.  The performances are good all the way around, but the tone is all over the place, so we can't quite get a handle on what kind of a movie they're in.  The film does have a certain easy-going charm, but it only takes it so far.

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