I really did enjoy the book. It was light and humourous. The two main characters, Emma and Dexter, get together (sort of) on graduation day, July 15, 1988, in Edinburgh. And each chapter of the book tells their story on the same day every year for the next 20 years. Everything about the post student years in London, the late 1980s through the 1990s, and on into the early Naughties resonates with readers of a certain generation. The cultural reference points and the characters were equally familiar, to me at least. And I did laugh out loud quite a lot.
Emma Morley is a lefty working class girl from up north, Leeds actually. She is an interesting character, funny in a deadpan kind of way, but at times rather too intense and idealistic. Dexter knows when he meets her that she probably has a thing for Nelson Mandela and Nina Simone. As well as playing in an all-girl band, she writes bad poetry in her spare time. She works in a tacky Mexican restaurant then later becomes a teacher. She joins a theatre arts collective and has an affair with a dreadful bore of a head teacher, all on her journey to becoming a successful writer and ‘making a difference’. You need to know this because it’s what gives her a spark and a certain charm, and you won’t get any of it from the film. The on-screen Emma is reduced to an irritating drip.
The only nod to Emma’s intelligence and early political activities in the film is a few badly fitting flowery dresses, worn with Doc Marten boots and rather too-large-for-her-face round lenses she must have picked up at Specsavers. She is meant to be slightly frumpy back then, but please, is it really true that lefty women of my generation were all so deeply unattractive? I wasn’t! And while I don’t want to go on about the appalling Yorkshire accent, it would be remiss of me not to mention it. There were the occasional words that sounded slightly northern, like ‘but’ and ‘bastard’ that were thrown in every now and then in a rather theatrical way. But mostly the accent was incredibly non-descript, like Ms Hathaway herself. During the London premiere of the film, she said that her voice coach told her that her American posture was going to give her away. She apparently needed to slouch a bit more. Really? I think she should have slouched a bit less and spent a bit longer watching Emmerdale.
Dexter Mayhew, on the other hand, is a good-looking, hedonistic, apolitical, upper middle class boy forging a career in mindless late-night TV. Jim Sturgess as Dexter seems to capture this pretty well. Somehow the relationship between the characters that develops over the 20 years from university to middle age is kind of believable, even romantic, in the novel. There was an obvious chemistry, completely missing on screen.
As I watched the film, I started to wonder why I had given these two the time of day. Emma in particular seems so bland. Part of the problem is that most of the cultural reference points have been scrubbed. Apart from the dates flashing up to indicate a change of year (so about once every five minutes), the only way you would guess that time has moved on is that half way through the film Emma ditches her dreadful glasses, gets a mobile phone and Dexter starts taking copious amount of cocaine.
I really started to question everything at this point. Why did an intelligent woman like Emma (the fictional Emma that is, not the one on screen) ever take a posh public school twat like Dexter seriously? Was it the acting or the script? But author David Nicholls wrote the script himself. At least Dexter has a bit more depth than Emma as a character on screen. He is sexy and very attractive to look at (or maybe I’m just biased), while at the same time able to portray his less attractive qualities of being very self-indulgent and emotionally immature. (Just like so many of the men we all met at that stage in our lives). Jim Sturgess also manages to get across his vulnerability, even when behaving appallingly towards his terminally ill mother. Suffice to say, he actually has a personality in the screen version.
David Nicholls writes so perceptively about class-ridden British society and its characters out of their comfort zone. He did it so well in his previous novel, Starter for Ten, that translated brilliantly into a very funny movie. This film is in a different league altogether.
I did actually laugh out loud twice during the movie. Once at a drunken karaoke wedding party scene, which really was very amusing and once at a joke told by Ian, Emma’s long suffering boyfriend, played to perfection by Rafe Spall. He is, in my view, the star of the show. He can actually really act and is very funny as the failed stand-up-comedian, who only managed to make Emma laugh once, when he fell down the stairs. The film whizzes by, not so much the story of Em and Dex: ‘will they?’ ‘won’t they actually get together and have sex? More of a when will they finally do the deed and when will it all be over?
Overall it is watchable as far as rom-coms go, but deeply disappointing for anyone who expected more having read the book. It is a real shame and surprisingly poor from Director Lone Scherfig, who did such a good job of bringing Lynn Barber’s autobiography to the screen in the really stylish and enjoyable film, An Education.
DIRECTED BY Lone Scherfig
STARRING Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess
USA 2011 107min
