Twenty years. Two people...Directed by Lone Scherfig (director of An Education, Academy Award-nominated for Best Picture), the motion picture One Day is adapted for the screen by David Nicholls from his beloved bestselling novel One Day.After one day together - July 15th, 1988, their university graduation - Emma Morley (Academy Award nominee Anne Hathaway) and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess, The Way Back, 21) begin a friendship that will last a lifetime. She is a working-class girl of principle and ambition who dreams of making the world a better place. He is a wealthy... charmer who dreams that the world will be his playground.For the next two decades, key moments of their relationship are experienced over several July 15ths in their lives. Together and apart, we see Dex and Em through their friendship and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. Somewhere along their journey, these two people realize that what they are searching and hoping for has been there for them all along. As the true meaning of that one day back in 1988 is revealed, they come to terms with the nature of love and life itself. [show more]
You would have thought that filmmakers would have got pretty good at telling stories like this by now. Boy-meets-girl setups and will-they-won't-they relationship soap-opera have been the bread and butter of romantic comedies and dramas since time immemorial, and One Day doesn't stray too far from these familiar trappings. Telling the story of student friends Emma and Dexter as they grow into middle-aged adults - and of the various obstacles that life throws at them along the way - the film concentrates largely on the (initially platonic) relationship between the two characters, and how the nature of their friendship changes as the years pass.
Despite making use of a fairly original gimmick - we only get to see what's happening in the characters' lives on one day per year (15th July, St Swithin's day) - the story is the kind of thing we've seen a million times before. It's pretty surprising, then, that a movie with such a simple and well-worn concept manages to fall into so many traps that make it far less enjoyable than it could have been.
My main problem with the film was with the character of Dexter. He's just so unlikeable and unpleasant that it's impossible to root for him, and even more difficult to understand what Emma might find attractive about him. His character's journey is actually quite an interesting one, with initial fame (as the presenter of laddish early-90s post-pub TV shows) giving way to alcoholism, relationship problems and depression. But there's never any point at which you truly feel sorry for him, because there's such a strong feeling that he's brought a lot of it upon himself through the selfish and callous way that he acts. Jim Sturgess does his best to find the humanity in Dexter's character, and the film does its best to throw tragedies at him (such as a death in the family, and marital difficulties), but it never really succeeds in making him likeable - which is a pretty big problem when he's one-half of the couple that the audience is meant to be willing to get together.
Anne Hathaway fares slightly better as Emma, a far kinder and more positive person who isn't without her own share of difficulties, but who faces them in a far more sympathetic manner. A struggling writer who spends years waiting tables before gradually edging closer towards being published, she's a bit of a cardboard-cutout of a character, but one that's easy to like and root for. Unfortunately, Hathaway saddles Emma with the odd affliction of a wandering accent, which becomes more and more distracting the more we see of her, constantly reminding you that this is a performance rather than a real person. It isn't that Hathaway's English accent is bad: it's just inconsistent. One moment she'll be speaking with a thick Yorkshire accent, and the next she'll be speaking the Queen's English (and sometimes, at times of high emotion, we even hear a bit of her native American twang creep in). I'm not sure why the filmmakers insisted on forcing Hathaway to act with an accent that she's not comfortable with - nothing about the story would be lost by making Emma American, rather than English - but it undercuts an otherwise solid performance.
Another major problem I had with the film is that it constantly uses outside events to force drama on the characters, rather than having drama grow organically out of their relationship. Life events that are completely out of the characters' control repeatedly conspire to throw a spanner in the works - which might be true to real life, but which also feels forced and contrived on the part of the writer (David Nicholls, adapting his own hit novel to the screen). Finally, the gimmick of the film's structure never really feels as though it's justified: the events that we see play out over the 20-years-or-so timespan covered by the movie could have taken place on any day of the year and it wouldn't have affected the story one jot. And even worse, the same-day-per-year structure is even used to avoid showing the audience some of the most important incidents in the characters' relationship, robbing us of seeing key moments that it felt like the whole film had been building towards.
With an unlikeable male lead, a distractingly-accented female, a clichéd setup, an arbitrary structure and a strong sense of forcedness to developments, there's so much wrong with this movie that it's difficult to pick out its few redeeming features (which include some enjoyable performances from supporting players like Rafe Spall and Ken Stott, and some beautiful photography of British locations, particularly in and around Edinburgh). By the time the movie rolls around to its melodramatic and slushy conclusion, I'd be surprised if any of the audience still cared.
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Please note this is a region 2 DVD and will require a region 2 (Europe) or region Free DVD Player in order to play. Twenty years. Two people... Directed by Lone Scherfig (director of An Education, Academy Award-nominated for Best Picture), the motion picture One Day is adapted for the screen by David Nicholls from his beloved bestselling novel One Day. After one day together - July 15th, 1988, their university graduation - Emma Morley (Academy Award nominee Anne Hathaway) and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess, The Way Back, 21) begin a friendship that will last a lifetime. She is a working-class girl of principle and ambition who dreams of making the world a better place. He is a wealthy charmer who dreams that the world will be his playground. For the next two decades, key moments of their relationship are experienced over several July 15ths in their lives. Together and apart, we see Dex and Em through their friendship and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. Somewhere along their journey, these two people realize that what they are searching and hoping for has been there for them all along. As the true meaning of that one day back in 1988 is revealed, they come to terms with the nature of love and life itself. Actors Anne Hathaway, Patricia Clarkson, Jim Sturgess, Romola Garai, Georgia King, Jodie Whittaker, Rafe Spall & Sarah Jane O'Neill Director Lone Scherfig Certificate 12 years and over Year 2011 Screen Widescreen 2.35:1 Anamorphic Languages English - Dolby Digital (5.1) Subtitles English for the hearing impaired ; Spanish Closed Captions Yes Region Region 2 - Will only play on European Region 2 or multi-region DVD players.
Lone Scherfig directs this romcom, based on the best-seller by David Nicholls, about two friends who reunite every year on the anniversary of their first meeting. Since the day when they first met at their college graduation - July 15th,1988 - Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess) have kept in touch, meeting up again on the same day each year. Over the following two decades, the ups and downs of the relationship between the idealistic Emma and wealthy ladies' man Dexter are revisited every July 15th, as they try to take stock of their lives, and attempt to discover what they've both been missing all along.
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