How to be Single Review

5 out of 10

Cast:

Dakota Johnson as Alice

Rebel Wilson as Robin

Leslie Mann as Meg

Alison Brie as Lucy

Anders Holm as Tom

Nicholas Braun as Josh

Damon Wayans Jr. as David

Jason Mantzoukas as George

Jake Lacy as Ken

Colin Jost as Paul

Sarah Ramos as Michelle

Zani Jones Mbayise as Phoebe

Directed by Christian Ditter

How to be Single Review:

People, by and large, do what they want. It sounds counterintuitive but it’s true. They eat the foods they want, try to date the people they want and make the same derivative movies they want, frequently with little self-reflection. The understanding of this, and a desire to either point it out or profit from it (or both) has been the basis for quite a lot of books, plays and films over the decades, and more than a few characters like Alice (Johnson). Alice isn’t sure what she wants, but she knows what she doesn’t – to move from relationship to relationship with no idea of herself as an individual – and decides to fix it by breaking up with her boyfriend (Braun) and embrace a New York single life.

There may be some idea in modern Hollywood more re-visited than the make-up of a New York single life, but I’m having a hard time coming up with it. Maybe heroes journey adventure stories, but it’s a close call. It’s become generic because people want it, of course; it fills a very specific need, a thought which can’t be shaken. When an idea enters our head, it tends to itch until we act on it, even if that means convincing ourselves it’s not as bad as it looks on first blush. Of course, a lot of the chaos in our lives stems from finding out a) we radically undervalued the cost of getting what we wanted in order to rationalize attaining it or b) we didn’t really want it in the first place.

In that sense, How to be Single is perfectly understandable; finding something people want is difficult, at least in part because they seldom know themselves so best hold onto to a popular idea once you’ve uncovered it. Novelist Liz Tucillo (He’s Just Not That Into You) learned the appeal of a women-focused, over-the-top tale of single life from her days working on Sex in the City and has kept to that formula ever since. From the comedically frank discussions of sex to the focus on rules for dating and even the character split among a fun-focused best friend Robin (Wilson), the ready-to-marry Lucy (Brie) and her algorithm for finding the right man or the practical and prepared for perpetual singlehood Meg (Mann), the forms are well obeyed. To spice things up a little, Tucillo and screenwriters Abby Kohn & Mark Silverstein (who also wrote He’s Just Not That Into You) have airdropped a knowing bartender (Holm) to explain the reality of dating life to the main character almost directly from the pages of their previous collaboration. The lack of originality does make good business sense; people old enough to remember Sex in the City might like it because it fills a hole, and those too young might like it because they would have liked Sex in the City if they’d been exposed to it. Translating that into good creative sense, however…

The cast is talented and game, particularly Johnson and Wilson who get many of the best gags, though the underutilized Brie does make startling effect of a children’s bookstore freak-out, which is probably How to be Single’s finest moment. They’re supported by an assortment of talented up and coming comic actors like Holm and Jake Lacey, and director Christian Ritter (Love, Rosie) proves himself an expert of timing, particularly visual gags, some which don’t pay off for an hour. But the fragmented story leaves them all hanging. Wilson shows up from time to time to spout off a one-liner and breathe some life back into the film, but quickly disappears with no applicable story of her own so that a late argument with Alice about how taken for granted she is comes out of nowhere and thus has no dramatic weight. But at least she’s better off than Brie, who is unconnected to most of the other stories and appears less and less often and with less and less consequence as the film moves on.

It’s a side effect of the writer’s doing what they want – putting together a very familiar romantic comedy – rather than what they should. [And sorting the two out is the work, not just of entering adulthood, but of a lifetime]. There’s enough awareness of the problems inherent that they’ve tried to differentiate by staggering the story through time, focusing specifically on Alice’s periods of being single as she learns that despite the hardships and second thoughts, it may have been what she wanted all along. But that choice forces the narrative and characters to skip over major elements – Alice’s one prolonged relationship lasts the length of an inter-title – while still referring to them and even developing subplots out of them. It creates drama with no weight and a film with no center because it doesn’t have enough faith in its characters to build them out.

What’s left is a film which is not just tired and old, but out of place. Inspired by a story and storytelling from fifteen years ago, How to be Single attempts to the tricky jujitsu of telling a story about the inner lives of women is entirely about their relationships with men… and ends up breaking its own neck. It’s so generic it requires real creativity to make an actual story out of it and people working from a playbook recycling someone else’s ideas aren’t the best individuals to expect a sudden burst of creativity from. The fact that people frequently want the familiar and comfortable isn’t a new idea but what’s needed is a new standard, not another version of the old one.