Warner Bros. Pictures
The “anthology” style of movie with a bunch of stories, often interconnected and with an underlying theme, is a difficult one to pull off successfully. In recent years Garry Marshall has brought to screen the terrible Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve, and the upcoming Mother’s Day. As you’d hear in The Sandman, it’s all overly sanitized pablum. It’s a difficult thing because you have to serve a dozen characters effectively and have a decent movie at the same time. But not everything is as bad as those movies.
How to Be Single comes from director Christian Ditter and is based on the novel of the same name by Liz Tuccillo, who also wrote the book “He’s Just Not That Into You” which was also turned into a movie. This one at least comes from a fictional book, not a self-help one, which is a plus for adaptation. The only non-fictional to fictional success I can even think of is Mean Girls. In the movie, we focus on Alice (Dakota Johnson) and various single people in New York City with different connections to each other.
Alice arrives in the city after graduating college and on a “break” from her longtime boyfriend Josh, ready to experience more out of life. She is immediately brought under the spell of fellow paralegal Robin (Rebel Wilson, playing her typical role) and is thrown into the party scene despite herself. Each has a different perspective; Alice wants to see what else is out there before settling down and Robin is happy being single. In contrast there’s the handsome bartender at the local bar, Tom (Anders Holm), who claims to be more than happy being brutally honest and being perpetually single.
Robin is silly and often quite fun, but sometimes the humor goes a bit too far into slapstick or meanness, losing the thread of comedy or characterization. Alice’s character has the most focus in the movie, with the most dramatic beats, for better and for worse.
In contrast to that contrast, there’s Lucy (Alison Brie), living upstairs to the bar and mooching off the bar’s Wi-Fi with her own issues: she wants to be married, and soon. So despite her looking like Alison Brie, she’s turning off a lot of guys but she’s also picky. This is the least successful subplot.
There’s also Meg (Leslie Mann), Robin’s older sister with her own issues. Meg is a successful OBY-GYN who put off kids for the sake of her career, but she may finally be changing her mind. Naturally shenanigans ensue when she meets the younger Ken (Jake Lacy) after making that choice. This is the most interesting subplot.
So Alice might hook up with people and have a few love triangles and dramas with flames old and new. Meg has to decide what she really wants. Lucy might just go crazy, and Tom might not get past his clichéd personality.
This sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. The movie sets up a lot of amusing ideas and has some killer performances, including a few I haven’t even mentioned like Damon Wayans, Jr. and Jason Mantzoukas as potential paramours. We have a movie filled with very talented comedic performers, although Dakota Johnson is really the “straight” girl here. She’s fine, but sometimes the movie gives her a bit too much to handle in my opinion.
In general, most of the melodrama becomes excessive, except for Meg’s storyline, which is pretty great. There are a lot of funny beats in Lucy’s storyline, but it seems almost pointless in its execution. The character is kinda cartoonish, as is Robin for that matter, but that works a bit better in context. Juxtaposing cartoonish jokes with heavy drama (a dead wife is literally a plot point here, and not a good one) is hard to pull off, and the movie doesn’t manage it that well.
A big positive is the messaging. The movie has a stance which is surprisingly complex: Not everyone needs to be with someone in a relationship. Some people want it and need it, some people think they want it but don’t need it, others are fine hooking up, others are fine being alone. When I heard the pro-”self love” (read into that what you will) song “Love Myself” by Hailee Steinfeld playing, I realized the movie wasn’t going to succumb to the complete clichéd ending.
And honestly, that was a great thing. I’m overall positive about the movie, despite its flaws. The drama isn’t so great for the most part, but the comedy is quite strong, the characters interesting, and the ending well thought out. Still a rom-com, but hey, nothing’s perfect.
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