Snuck In Love-With The Independent Romantic Comedy Stuck In Love In Mind

DVD Review



By Sam Lowell   



Stuck In Love, starring Jennifer Connelly, Greg Kinnear, 2012   

 

Sometimes in the heat of summer you reach for a light-hearted comedy, let’s call this one under review, Stuck on Love, a romantic comedy since the trials and tribulations of failed and budding romance are central to anything comedic about the film, for the same reason that you reach for summer- lite reading. You know those thrillers, mysteries, and private detection novels that are an easy read and quick too. That was my reaction to this film after viewing on one hot summer night when one more of a recent string of heavy foreign films thick with social meaning and classics status were just too hard on the head, too hard to digest against the summer doldrums.       

The plot line on this one is simplicity itself. A well-known and apparently successful considering the house on the beach he resided in, novelist, Bill played by Greg Kinnear, two years after having suffered divorce from the mother of his two children which he had custody of, Erica played by Jennifer Connelly, still had it bad, still had not moved on, was still stuck in love if you want to know. He lived and acted like Erica was coming back, that not all the hopes he had for the future were for naught.  So interspersed throughout the film were  scenes between the two which dealt with the coming together and moving apart of that possible return that everybody in the audience knew was  going to be end result of this one. See Erica had waited for him once when he wandered off the reservation and Bill firmly expected her to do the same-when she came to her senses despite her re-marriage to some light-weight guy.    

Of course plotting the build-up to the grand finale of a stuck in love film based solely on our writer friend’s expectations would leave very thin gruel for our viewing pleasure. So to fill out the story we are taken up close and personal on the ups and downs of the love affairs of those two young adult children, who surprise, surprise are both chips off the old block, both wannabe writers, one the daughter who already had a book contract and publication (despite not having on screen anyway lifted pen to paper, or better fingers to word processor for one minute). So we get a high school romance between the sensitive guy son, Rusty, who fell for some dime store sister cocaine fellow classmate, Kate, and Sam who despite her wanderlust hook-up and love “em and leave them guy existence fell for a guy, Lou, in her class at college. Sam who had before Lou had been happy to wander and not be touched by love after Erica left the household and who felt betrayed by her.     

Naturally all these interpersonal tensions (except the one with Rusty and Kate since she was in rehab and so a serious question mark) also got resolved when Mom and Pop were reunited at the Thanksgiving dinner table. No high cinematic credentials and certainly no high literary credentials for the contrived story line here although Pop quoting from the great short story writer Raymond Carver from one of his most famous stories and some very good sound track songs meant that I could not totally hate the effort. A great film for a very hot, humid summer evening, okay.