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How To Be Single

HOW TO BE SINGLE (Christian Ditter). 110 minutes. Opens Friday (February 12). See listings. Rating: NNN


The poster for How To Be Single features Alison Brie, Rebel Wilson, Dakota Johnson and Leslie Mann just hanging out and laughing together in an image designed to tweak memories of Bridesmaids and the Pitch Perfect movies – you know, raucous, raunchy celebrations of female friendship and wacky romantic adventure.

I’d like to see that movie. How To Be Single isn’t it. It’s something else, though that’s not always a bad thing.

Based on the book by Liz Tuccillo in much the same way that Sex And The City was based on Candace Bushnell’s writing – which is to say not at all – How To Be Single is an ensemble piece following four women (and a couple of men) over a year or so of hookups, relationships and personal growth in New York City. Sometimes it’s a comedy and sometimes it’s more dramatic. Once or twice it even goes somewhere truly special.

The script, credited to Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein and producer Dana Fox, sets up a few relationships and pinballs between them. Our narrator, Alice (Dakota Johnson), is a paralegal who decides to put her four-year relationship with Josh (Nicholas Braun) on hold so she can figure out who she is without him. 

Alice meets Robin (Rebel Wilson), a pure hedonist who barrels through life with the brash confidence you will recognize from every other character Wilson has ever played. Robin takes Alice to her favourite bar and encourages her to bang the owner, Tom (Anders Holm). He’s a serial dater who’s designed his entire life to avoid getting truly personal with anyone – including Lucy (Alison Brie), who’s moved into the apartment above his establishment and spends all her time stealing his WiFi and trying to perfect a dating algorithm to find the perfect man.

Other key characters include Alice’s older sister Meg (Leslie Mann), a workaholic OB/GYN who’s suddenly become aware of her ticking biological clock David (Damon Wayans Jr.), a developer Alice meets at a networking event and Ken (Jake Lacy), a nice guy at Alice and Robin’s office who thinks Meg is hot.

Christian Ditter, director of the already forgotten Lily Collins-Sam Claflin romance Love, Rosie, keeps everything slick and commercial. Maybe it’s best to picture How To Be Single as an anthology of interlocking stories – and in this way, it’s similar to He’s Just Not That Into You, another Kohn-Silverstein script that took a Tuccillo text and spun it into an all-star multi-character romp. 

But He’s Just Not That Into You was dopey and disposable, and How To Be Single isn’t quite. The script seesaws between the stuff of cliché – impossible romantic gestures, humiliating emotional explosions saved by the arrival of a good-natured stranger – and genuine feeling, both comic and dramatic. Sometimes it even does both in the same scene. 

I’m thinking that’s largely thanks to the influence of writer/producer Fox, whose signature fumbling dialogue – so perfectly delivered by Johnson in the short-lived 2012 sitcom Ben And Kate – can be heard in most of Alice’s scenes, and a few of Meg’s. They don’t sound like movie characters with perfect comic timing and an answer for everything they sound like people who don’t know what they want and can’t figure out where they’re going. 

When How To Be Single focuses on these characters, letting them own their decisions and confront the consequences of their choices, it’s much deeper and more resonant than the sparkly cinematography and relentlessly upbeat soundtrack would have you believe. It’s actually about something, which makes the film’s placement as a big Valentine’s Day release seem even odder. 

But the priorities of that movie are at odds with the movie How To Be Single thinks it needs to be – one where Robin does the wacky things one expects Rebel Wilson to do in a comedy and Lucy endures one romantic disappointment after another until the movie kinda just forgets about her, to the point where her big third-act scene seems to have been rewritten for Alice.

So, yeah, it’s sort of a mess, all over the place, and it doesn’t really have anything to say about being single, hooking up, serious dating or whatever. But there’s enough to Alice and Meg’s stories – and to David’s, which turns out to be thornier and more complex than anyone has a right to expect from a movie like this – that I’m still thinking about them the next day. That’s definitely something.

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