One Day (2011)
Directed by Lone Scherfig
After spending the night together on the eve of their college graduation, Dexter and Emma are shown each year on the same date to see where they are in their lives. They are sometimes together, and sometimes not.
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14 films that influenced One Day
What critics say influenced One Day
I haven’t read One Day the book, so I didn’t know not to expect a Same Time, Next Year sort of gimmick.
Even the story's conceit is shoddy: Unlike its precursor (1978's Same Time, Next Year), this couple doesn't necessarily need an annual face-to-face encounter.
On the other hand... Reel Thoughts: A Blue Valentine (That People Will Actually Want to Watch): From Same Time, Next Year to (500) Days of Summer to last year’s brutal Blue Valentine, films that unfold on timelines are fascinating, because you get to see the characters change, sometimes radically, from date to date.
Nicholls' charming novel had a Same Time, Next Year?style premise, checking in on Dex and Em every single July 15 for 20 years, wherever they might be on that day; in adapting his book for the screen, Nicholls skips some years and does some compression of events.
From Same Time, Next Year to (500) Days of Summer to last year’s brutal Blue Valentine, films that unfold on timelines are fascinating, because you get to see the characters change, sometimes radically, from date to date.
Still, there's a spark between them, which makes the plot somewhat derivative and implausible: we saw this in Sandra Goldbacher's more complex Me Without You.
Sturgess, on the other hand, proves quite capable of channeling the kind of charming lout that Hugh Grant played in the similarly structured "Four Weddings and a Funeral."
"One Day" is more of a piece with a march-of-time, thwarted love epic like "The Way We Were," and those in the date-movie crowd who've not read the book need to prepare for an extremely uncute ending.
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Patricia Clarkson (Far from Heaven, Easy A) is good as always in her brief turn as Dex's doting, terminally ill mother.
Also lingering long after the moment has passed is Patricia Clarkson's (2010's " Cairo Time ") touching admittance that she worries her son isn't the nice person he used to be.
"One Day" is based on the novel by David Nicholls, who wrote the screenplay, and is directed by Lone Scherfig, the Danish director of "An Education" and "Italian for Beginners."
Because it’s a film now, directed by Lone Scherfig, the Danish filmmaker whose “Italian for Beginners” announced a warm, new humanist talent in 2000 — and whose “An Education” confirmed that, nine years later.
Scherfig's 2000 Silver Bear-winning Italian For Beginners proved that the austere strictures of Danish filmmaking movement Dogme 95 could accommodate a fizzy, Miramax -primed, Euro-rom-com.
Even Scherfig’s break-through film Italian for Beginners (2000), made under the stylistic restrictions of the Dogme 95 movement, features a lot of grief and death amid the various romantic storylines.
Notwithstanding the considerable attractions of its stars, the characters never entirely emerge in this film from Scherfig, the maker of Italian for Beginners and An Education.
The primary feeling of One Day, though, is somehow wishing it could be better-- that Sturgess had maintained some of his leading man reserve from The Way Back and better commanded the screen, that Hathaway had allowed a little more spark into Emma, and especially that Scherfig and Nichols had found better ways to recreate the book's lived-in, confident charm.
On July 14, 1988, bookish liberal Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) finds herself paired up with her hidden crush, the good looking, silver-spooned Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess, "The Way Back"), after graduating from the University of Edinburgh.
As for Jim Sturgess (last seen in Peter Weir’s The Way Back), he is a clever, deft actor.
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She started breaking with her "Princess Diaries" roots back in 2005 by doing "Brokeback Mountain," following it up with "The Devil Wears Prada" in 2006 and an Oscar-nominated turn in " Rachel Getting Married " in 2008.
It also represents a rare misstep for the usually reliable Focus Features, maker of such gay-interest successes as Brokeback Mountain, Milk and Beginners .
She can act, too (see Brokeback Mountain), but there's no tamping down the glossy dark beauty that raised her from a gawky teen who morphs into a soignee royal under the tutelage of Julie Andrews in the charming The Princess Diaries, or from grad-school preppy duds to designer threads in The Devil Wears Prada, the better to take crap from Meryl Streep.
She's willing to play a part like in "Brokeback Mountain" or "Love And Other Drugs" where she's downright difficult to like at times.
I want to give director Lone Scherfig a pass on this, because I’ve loved her other films: An Education is a remarkable and rare look at female adolescence, and Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is an unforgettable black comedy.
Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2002) is about suicide, An Education (2009) is about a relationship between a teenage girl and an older man with dubious motives, and now One Day is about missed opportunities and failing to embrace the moment.