I Give It a Year | Review #2

Give it a Rest: Mazer’s Pedestrian Debut Examines Marriages, Relationships, Mediocrity

The most surprising item concerning I Give It a Year, a purposefully unromantic comedy about finding true romance, is the fact that it’s the directorial debut of Dan Mazer, the writer behind all things Sacha Baron Cohen from Ali G. through Bruno (2009). Thankfully maintaining a semblance of sexual frankness in relation to interactions between what we need to believe are realistic adult characters, Mazer neglects every other avenue of interest in a stranglehold of banality. Primarily an effort that ceaselessly depicts the relationship of two people that clearly don’t belong together, and fruitlessly examines all their useless attempts to “make it work,” Mazer creates two wholly unremarkable and unrelatable composites, whose devolution is made all the more banal because we’re never led to care for them in the first place.

In its opening sequence, we glance at the first meeting and immediate wedding of Nat (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Rafe Spall), a matter of seconds collapsing their first seven months together that led to the special day. Of course, this is usually where we head to the exits in most romantic-comedies. As they schmooze at the altar, Nat’s sister, Naomi (Minnie Driver), petulantly sputters our title. And so we dive into the messy relationship of a mismatched couple, and we wonder what the hell made these two fall in love in the first place. She’s an anal retentive advertising executive and he’s a loafer posing as a writer, and while seven months is no great span of time, it’s certainly enough time for these two to at least realize their basic differences. Instead, all the blatant predictions from their wedding ceremony blaze into fruition as the two begin seeing a revolving door of couples’ therapists within months, including the goofy and inappropriate Linda (Olivia Coleman). Conveniently, they both have more appropriate counterparts dangling right before their eyes, what with Josh’s American ex-girlfriend Chloe (Anna Faris), who he never really broke up with after she moved to Africa for a few years, and Guy (Simon Baker), a potential client for Nat, who removes her wedding ring to woo him into a deal.

Mazer’s pointed attempts to avoid the formulaic the rom-com by showing us two people that really shouldn’t be together, instead slips into a lobotomized autopilot of its own. Most of us see variations of this at reunions and holidays with more fun to be had because we’re usually at least invested in the lives of those unlucky victims of love. Nat and Josh are genuinely unremarkable, undercutting any subversion Mazer could have possibly attained.

While the assured and talented Rose Byrne is usually a sight for sore eyes, here she’s a neutered harpy. It’s hard to care about her romance with the smug and smarmy Simon Baker (his signature role it seems, as he could have stepped right off the reels of The Devil Wears Prada to ensnare another unstimulated business lady), who flirts by referring to himself as a “ludicrously attractive” single person. But it’s hard to fault a straying eye with Rafe Spall’s (yes, son of Timothy) asinine and immature prototype of the amateur author. And while Mazer sorely wastes the talent of the wonderful Olivia Coleman (Tyrannosaur; The Iron Lady, 2011) he at least gives Anna Faris a delightful chance to shine in the lone hilarious sequence, involving her potential boyfriend and a surprise ménage a trois. Minnie Driver, while caustically amusing, is underutilized, apparently on hand to spruce up the blandness of the main course.

While formula may be the age old enemy to cinema, the universal component to fantasies of the human condition necessary to our enjoyment is, at the very least, likeable and engaging characterizations. I Give It a Year certainly doesn’t give us its all.