WHAT’S YOUR NUMBER? (Mark Mylod). 106 minutes. Opens Friday (September 30). See listing. Rating: NNNN
Finally, someone’s built a romantic comedy around Anna Faris that doesn’t try to sand down her rough, weird edges. And the world’s a better place for it.
Faris broke out in the Scary Movie series and has been struggling to define herself as more than just “the funny girl with the squinchy face and no boundaries” ever since, finding showcases for her curveball timing in Smiley Face and The House Bunny. But those films cast her as comic caricatures, not actual characters in What’s Your Number? Faris gets to portray a proper human being for a change.
The premise plays like a chick-lit spin on Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Faris’s newly single, newly jobless Bostonian, Ally Darling, learns from a magazine article that a woman who’s had 20 sexual partners has little chance of landing a husband, so she decides to look up her previous boyfriends to find out if there might be a future in her past. To do that, she enlists the help of the cad across the hall who’s much better at Googling things than she is.
The cad is played by Captain America’s Chris Evans with the same obnoxious confidence he brought to his previous superhero role as the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four films. I wouldn’t have pegged him for this sort of movie, but he nails it.
Faris and Evans have the kind of chemistry people used to describe as “fizzy” they spark off each other in unexpected ways, and their standard loathe-at-first-sight dynamic evolves believably through friendly taunting into the inevitable attraction. But unlike every other romantic comedy released in the last decade or so, What’s Your Number? doesn’t oversell that dynamic it just puts it out there and lets the actors do most of the work.
There’s a lot to like about this movie. Director Mark Mylod – a veteran of the British television comedies The Fast Show, Shameless and The Royle Family, among others – fills out the supporting cast with engaging comic performers including Ari Graynor (Nick And Norah’s Infinite Playlist) as Ally’s younger sister and Blythe Danner as their obsessive mother. Zachary Quinto and Joel McHale turn up as two of Ally’s conquests, and Faris’s real-life husband, Chris Pratt (recently seen stealing scenes in Moneyball), has some great moments as another ex.
The script, adapted by Simpsons and Seinfeld writer Jennifer Crittenden and Scrubs writer Gabrielle Allan from a novel by Karyn Bosnak, provides a steady supply of off-centre observations and one-liners, and nicely subverts most of the rom-com clichés. The only time What’s Your Number? sags is when it hews too close to the genre it’s mocking – and each time, Faris pulls it back from the edge with a well-timed blurt. She’s just that good.
normw@nowtoronto.com
