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| 'Definitely, Maybe' |
| Directed by Adam Brooks (2008) |
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Howard Schumann (howard16)  |
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Published 2008-12-07 16:50 (KST) |
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One of the rules of good parenting is to always remember that you are the parent, not the buddy or the pal. Once you put your son or daughter on the same level as you, you forfeit the authority that allows you to govern the household.
This lesson is lost, however, on writer-director Adam Brooks and his main character, advertising executive Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) in the romantic comedy "Definitely, Maybe." On the verge of divorce, Will delves back into his romantic past to try to figure out what went wrong and tells his visiting 11-year-old daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin) a bedtime story - the painful details of his failed love life.
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FROM THE SECTION |
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| The film opens with Maya, fresh out of sex education classes, spouting details about thrusting penises into vaginas and pressing dad for details about the women he "rehearsed" with before he met mom. Changing the names of his three girlfriends, dad turns it into a parlor game in which Maya must guess who her mother is, hard as it is to believe that she would have no idea how her parents met or know her mother's background. The film then flashes back to 1992 where we meet Will volunteering for the "Clinton for President" campaign, two idealists heading for a romantic train wreck.
Soon we are introduced to Will's previous lovers: college girlfriend Emily (Elizabeth Banks) whom he meets in Madison, Wisconsin before heading off to New York; April (Isla Fischer), a perky copy girl in the Clinton campaign whose age and facial expressions do not change throughout the film even though 16 years have elapsed; and Summer (Rachel Weisz) a former classmate of Emily now a sophisticated journalist presently involved with womanizer Hampton Roth (Kevin Kline), her much older thesis advisor and a political analyst. The three relationships consist mostly of Will getting dumped and then coming back for more punishment.
As the bedtime fairy tale continues, Will raises tons of money for the Clinton campaign, then starts his own consulting company with partner and friend Derek Luke. At the same time, mirrored by nasty TV footage of Clinton's escapades in the 90s, Will cannot seem to maintain a healthy long term relationship with any of his eligible women. Though the dialogue strains for wit and topicality, nothing rings true and the film meanders from one cliche to another. Along the way, the viewer and pre-teen Maya are forced to revisit Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky, hear about threesomes, lesbian group sex, and professors seducing their students -- all presumably appropriate for an 11-year old.
The parlor game of "is she or isn't she my mother?" has a limited shelf life and, by the time the girlfriends have disappeared and then reappeared into Will's life ad nauseum, most of us have either long figured out the film's puzzle or could care less. While some have called "Definitely, Maybe" an example of the movies over sexualizing of children, to me it is more of an exercise in bad writing and bad directing with the ending as inappropriate as the beginning. Released on Valentine's Day, the film's only value may be as a primer of what to avoid in relationships, parenting, and need I add -- movie-going.
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©2008 OhmyNews
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