Going the Distance (2010)
Directed by Nanette Burstein
Erin and Garrett are very much in love. When Erin moves to San Francisco to finish her journalism degree and Garrett stays behind in New York to work in the music industry, they gamely keep the romance alive with webcams and frequent-flyer miles. But just when it seems the lovers will soon be reunited, they each score a big break that could separate them for good.
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What critics compared Going the Distance to
Barrymore overdoes the tomboy schtick “cool” girls have been required to do since the late ’90s (something about Mary, as I recall): she eats like a pig, drinks like a fish, rules at video games, loves The Shawshank Redemption, and takes monster bong hits.
Space allows the characters to have a sense of humor about themselves and time to indulge in the goofy giddiness of a new relationship, whether Garrett impersonates Morgan Freeman after learning Erin’s favorite movie is “The Shawshank Redemption” or Erin grins and throws out a hot dog she was about to eat after Garrett calls and asks her to dinner.
They drink, eat wings, play trivia, smoke pot and bond over “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Top Gun.”
As Erin and Garrett struggle to stretch lust across 3,000 miles via Skype, it's hard to maintain much interest in the fate of their union, in part because what they're like is so predicated on what they like, and what they like—they bond over YouTube memes, bar trivia, and The Shawshank Redemption—is so fucking boring.
The two hit it off immediately, bonding over beer, bong hits, arcade games and The Shawshank Redemption and embark on a six week whirlwind romance.
Thus, like Sleepless in Seattle (1993), a film with which it otherwise has nothing in common, Going the Distance is a romance in which the principals spend much of their screen time apart, which gives first-time screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe plenty of room to fill with eclectic supporting characters.
So it's shaping up as a long haul, with certain echoes of Ephron's classic exercise in delayed gratification, Sleepless in Seattle, without being nearly as extreme.
As movies about displaced sweethearts go, " Going the Distance " is stuck somewhere between "Sleepless in Seattle" and a hard place.
Directed with reclaimed exuberance by Ivan Reitman (2006's " My Super Ex-Girlfriend "), who hasn't made something this good in nearly twenty years, the film, like 2010's underappreciated " Going the Distance ," is an all-too-rare R-rated romantic comedy that uses its rating not as an excuse to be needlessly raunchy, but instead to simply be honest and forthright about its characters and subject matter.
Anyone who was amused by Drew Barrymoreâs recent Going the Distance will find some similar giggles here.
But I was so on board from minute one, in a way I haven't been for a conventional rom-com since 2010's Going the Distance.