Film review: Going the Distance

If rom-coms were better, we wouldn’t have to be grateful for Going the Distance. If rom-com heroines were less uptight, we wouldn’t have to be grateful for Drew Barrymore. Clearly, Ms. Barrymore has the potential to be annoying: she’s 35 (31 in the movie) trying to be 18. In 20 years she’ll doubtless have turned into one of those desperately chirpy middle-aged women who drink too much and embarrass their daughters by wanting to be ‘friends’. Right now, however, her main competition in the rom-com stakes is Katherine Heigl – whose onscreen persona is sweet but terminally insecure – and Jennifer Aniston, who looks like she’s had every ounce of fun surgically squeezed out of her. No wonder we’re grateful.
Drew is a tomboy. She wears torn jeans and eats buffalo wings with abandon, getting sauce all over her face. When she laughs, she cackles like a dirty-minded sailor. She can often be found playing old-school videogames –  indeed that’s where our hero (Justin Long) finds her, when he interferes with her attempt to get a high score on ‘Centipede’. She plays darts, gets drunk, gets in a bar-fight and taunts her opponent with cries of “Suck my dick!”. She acts like a guy in other ways as well. She messes with Justin by pretending to be mad in the irrational way women have (sorry ladies), then laughs at his chagrin. Above all, she wants to keep things casual. After the couple first sleep together, she’s the one who tries to sneak out in the morning (he has to call her back to bed); her greatest wish, she insists, is not to “choke each other with commitment”.
Commitment is a scary concept here. Like other recent comedies (License to Wed and The Heartbreak Kid come to mind), Going the Distance has a deep-seated fear of marriage. Married couples are lame and pathetic; they argue over trifles – whether to call boxes boxes or “cardboard containers” – and think dry-humping is the height of passion (the film is quite explicit when it comes to sex, or at least sex-talk). This is a movie about 30-somethings trying to stay young, which is why it tries so hard to be ‘edgy’. Rom-com heroines often have girly jobs like designers or wedding planners, but both Drew and Justin have edgy jobs – she a journalist, he a record-company exec with a special affinity for indie bands. Going the Distance badly wants to be cutting-edge, a capsule of how young people live in 2010. “I see you haven’t entered me into your phone yet,” he says, that being today’s trendy harbinger of growing intimacy. Later, when the relationship goes long-distance, they bond over cute YouTube videos of pandas sneezing.
That, by the way – the long-distance relationship, not the pandas – is the main plot, and another thing to be grateful for is the absence of tortuous rom-com plotting. We get very little of the usual hokum where the couple nearly break up over some absurd misunderstanding then noisily reunite in a public place with everyone cheering and applauding. Going the Distance is almost convincing, its romance almost recognisable, its characters’ behaviour almost human. If rom-coms were better, that wouldn’t matter much; but they’re not, so it does.
Alas, it’s also riddled with clichés. The wary, over-protective older sister worked in Jerry Maguire, but Jerry Maguire was 14 years ago. And the hero’s trash-talking guy friends are an obnoxious convention that really needs to be written out of American comedies. Played by sitcom actors – Charlie Day stars in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – they talk in sitcom rhythms, only dirtied-up for the big screen; listening to a conversation on how to “suck your own dick”, or watching Day’s character play a whole scene while sitting on the toilet in full view of his friends (he has an “open-door policy” when it comes to defecation) isn’t just puerile and unpleasant – it also doesn’t belong in a film that’s trying to evoke something halfway-real. But maybe it just comes with being ‘edgy’.
Actually, Going the Distance isn’t really edgy. Like Drew Barrymore – a woman who’s been through a lot, and uses tomboy bluster to hide her essential fragility – it’s basically soft, just terrified of appearing soft. It uses cheesy 80s songs as a backdrop to Drew and Justin’s love-in, but disguises them with jokes (they’re supposedly being played through the wall by his indiscreet flatmate). It gets the couple to a romantic restaurant, but arranges it so the waiter’s inept and the wine is terrible. Some might say the film (and Drew) is afraid of love. After all, the Heigls and Anistons get burly, manly men like Gerard Butler whereas Drew gets Justin Long – they’re also together in real life – a scrawny, boyish dude known (among other things) for not being “special” enough for Britney Spears’ high-school princess in Crossroads eight years ago. Going the Distance is a patchy rom-com, and a very qualified recommendation. Still, if the choice is between Britney Spears and Drew Barrymore … well, let’s just say we’re grateful.