FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS (Will Gluck). 104 minutes. See listing. Rating: NNN
Hey, remember that movie where Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher tried to be fuck buddies and ended up falling in love despite the fact that she’s a borderline sociopath and he’s kind of a doormat?
Well, here’s a picture that flips the dynamic, moves the action from Los Angeles to New York and stars Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake as the eponymous lovers without love. No Strings Attached, meet Friends With Benefits. Really, it’s uncanny. The films are so similar in their construction that one can’t help wondering whether Portman and Kunis ever thumbed through each other’s scripts on the set of Black Swan just to kill time.
Friends With Benefits casts Kunis as driven corporate recruiter Jamie, and Timberlake as Dylan, the up-and-coming graphic designer she convinces to join GQ in Manhattan. They become friends and soon figure out that their complementary “emotional damage” – which boils down to daddy issues and a tendency to get dumped – allows them to get naked without getting emotional.
A season of boffing follows, until Jamie starts to develop feelings and Dylan retreats, at which point Friends With Benefits becomes exactly like every other romantic comedy you’ve ever seen – and that’s only a problem because director Will Gluck keeps reminding us how calculated and contrived most romantic comedies have become, what with their wall-to-wall soundtracks and outsized, impossible climaxes.
Gluck’s trying to do for the rom-com what he did for the John Hughes comedy in his previous feature, Easy A. And though he doesn’t fully succeed this time around, he takes a respectable stab at raising the bar in what’s become a pretty feeble genre. Kunis and Timberlake aren’t exactly Tracy and Hepburn, but they’re pleasant enough to watch, and their relationship doesn’t require the same suspension of disbelief as Portman and Kutcher’s did in No Strings Attached.
Better still, when Richard Jenkins turns up as Dylan’s faltering father, Friends With Benefits actually makes the most of the added weight, subtly suggesting that Jamie and Dylan are trying to postpone their own adulthood by behaving like horny teenagers. Throwing in Patricia Clarkson as Jamie’s immature mother underscores the point.
Friends With Benefits isn’t exactly moving – or laugh-out-loud funny, for that matter – but it does have some clever dialogue and moments of perceptive observation. In other words, it’s a lot better than No Strings Attached, and really, that’s all you can ask of a movie like this.
normw@nowtoronto.com
