KINDA, SORTA IT’S A FEEL GOOD MOVIE?

Definitely, Maybe (2008)
Written and Directed by Adam Brooks
Cast: Ryan Reynolds (Will Hayes), Abigail Breslin (Maya Hayes), Elizabeth Banks (Emily), Isla Fisher (April). Kevin Kline (Hampton Roth), Rachel Weisz (Summer Hartley)
PLOT: Divorced man Will Hayes explains to his precocious daugher how he met and married her mother. In a series of flashbacks Will courts three women – college sweetheart Emily (Banks), New York temptress Summer (Weisz) and flaky but steadfast April (Isla Fisher) - against a backdrop of 1990s New York.
Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Toward the end of Adam Brooks’ interminable Definitely, Maybe Will Hayes, played by the puppydog sincere Ryan Reynolds, decides to give April (the charming Isla Fisher) thirty seconds to answer her doorbell and take a place in his life. He could give her ten seconds - but then the movie would be twenty seconds shorter, and director Brooks seems to think than length equals quality. Ah, if only.

Those twenty extraneous seconds are an indicator of this film’s main problems, its length and lack of dramatic substance. Almost two hours of watching theoretically witty twenty-somethings dither about their romantic entanglements is about thirty minutes too many. Add in the stereotypically cutesy-poo potty-mouthed child (Abigail Breslin, wasted in a terribly written part), cheaply anachronistic jokes (mainly about Bill Clinton’s romantic peccadilloes), punch lines that raise a guffaw at best, nauseatingly gooey “life lesson” sentiments and – well, if Definitely was a soufflé you could drop it and no one would be the wiser.

The other big problem with the movie is that our hero Will is one really boring guy. He seems to have no interests other than women. True, he has a career in politics, but outside of that, nada. No hobbies for this stiff! And his interest in women seems perfunctory, almost passionless. There’s certainly no sizzle between Reynolds and his three ladies, and the Hollywood notion that these three intelligent, beautiful women would fall for him (two of them more than once) stretches my Eastern seaboard credulity past the breaking point.

The one moment when Will threatens to develop a personality – when he starts to drink too much and self-pityingly lashes out against April – is frittered away by Brooks. Is it because a real problem would upset the fragile balance of this so-called comedy, or is it because Brooks is out of his depth? Will ends up as nothing more than a mouthpiece for some flat-footed witticisms, and Reynolds deserves some credit for remaining charming in spite of that. Weisz also brings charm to a thankless part, the (again) stereotypically ruthless but beautiful career girl.

For the latest exhibit in the Real Estate Of Cinema Hall of Fame, Definitely offers Will’s apartment, another in a long series of the unbelievably large New York apartments found only in the two-dimensional world. One of my favorites of this ilk was Rhoda Morgenstern’s New York apartment – enormous, with a balcony – on a window dresser’s pay. Yeah, right.

About midway through Definitely, I started wondering about my romantic entanglements. The movie made me rather glad that I’m currently single. Brooks makes love look so complicated and strangely lacking in fun that a life of celibacy, religiously enforced or otherwise, looks better. Once the movie ended and I left the theater, I realized the error of my thinking and I did feel better. But then I didn’t feel bad before I entered the theater…