One Day with superstar Anne Hathaway in trailers looks like a fun and interesting movie that has a slightly different story. And then the movie starts.
OD is the story of Emma (Hathaway) and Dex (Tom Sturgiss). They live in England in 1988. They are college friends who become better acquainted on graduation day. What begins then is a 20 year friendship/romance thing that stretches over the miles, and the years. Dex is a playboy, TV star that burns up his 20's with a nice TV gig. He also becomes a heavy drinker, a womanizer and loses all real sense of decency that even stretches into his mothers eventual loss to cancer. All the while maintaining a platonic relationship with Emma, who is love starved for his affections. And Dex knows it.
Emma who has great potential spends her 20's twisting in the wind. Working horrible jobs, and spending time with men she doesn't really care for. All the while seemingly waiting for Dex to grow up. Will this relationship ever happen? That is the whole thing in a nutshell with One Day.
Kudos to Hathaway. Her versatility is really amazing. They make her up wonderfully to give her many looks over the course of 20 years, and she really looks amazing, and spot on in all era's. Also she continually takes on roles that are demanding, and not easily filled by Hollywood also-rans. She is clearly the star of this movie as she creates a very sympathetic Emma. You are drawn to her, like her and are pulling for her to have a nice life, and to get things right with or without Dex. But Hathaway's beauty, smile, fake accent, charm and all around wonderful performance can not outrun predictability and a sell-out story.
One Day sounds like a real good idea, and it is. But the whole time you can see it coming, the senseless almost mandatory plot development of "this has been done 1,000 times before." This movie looks in advertisements as somewhat charming, and it's not. This is heavy drama plain and simple. One Day deals with a endless array of grown up heavyweight issues and situations. And the whole time you know what is eventually going to happen. And it does. It's so sad to see that movie makers can take a pretty good idea, and not be creative enough to develop a different result that would make their movie stand above the fray.
Some will, love, love, love this movie. Others will wonder why they are there as the manhole cover sitting on their chests gets heavier and heavier. But by now means should anyone think this is a romantic comedy of any kind. This is a pretty good basic premise, that is highly adult, and very bleak. So buyer beware.
Hathaway is great again, and the supporting cast is decent but that makes no mind. There's really no one else that matters here. It's Hathaway's movie that that's the end of that. Without her this is a complete and total washout.
One Day. Like it's inner love story this is love/hate on the outside too.
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