There has been a new genre making its way into the multiplex movie houses these days, the raunchy female empowering flick. It is the type of film where girls have potty mouths and act more like frat-boys in the 1980s. In entries like Bridesmaids and Sisters, the girls get all wild and crazy. The latest to take on this mantle is How to be Single, a film about four different women who live tangent lives. There is Alice (Dakota Johnson) who is a recent graduate from college. She decides to take a break from her boyfriend and discover a wider world in NYC. She gets a job at a law firm and meets Robin (Rebel Wilson), a party girl who lives for the nightlife. She is a sex machine and works her craft on a nightly basis, seeing the world as millions of guys she has not been intimate with and wants to discover every one of them before she is done. Most of the raunchy comedy comes from her mouth and other body parts.
Alice shares the apartment with her sister, delivery doctor Meg (Leslie Mann). The woman is way too busy for a man even though she takes care of one of the most tasking events a woman will endure – the birth of a child. Then one day, the baby clock goes off and she begins to want a child herself. The group hangs out at a bar run by Tom (Anders Holm), who is the ultimate single guy that’s practiced all the lines for one night stands. Lucy (Alison Brie) lives in the apartment up above Tom’s bar and uses it as her living room. They have a friendly relationship but are attracted to one another. She is obsessed about getting married and uses all the matching date sites to find the perfect man. Even though Lucy believes that she can use scientific means to find an ideal mate, Tom believes that it is more of a gut reaction.
The film shows the different women during about a year in their lives. Each tries to find a different path to happiness and the story doesn’t take the easy route. Within five minutes, the audience guesses what will happen with each individual and is surprised by the ending with each character. The trio of writers never dips into the cliché well but gives the audience a firecracker of surprises. Director Christian Dotter takes the audience on a roller coaster of emotions, which in the end is not a good thing. Comedy scenes are slammed together with emotional scenes in a Frankenstein manner, stitched with different mismatched parts. A comedy should have smoothness like a calm river or a roughness like a roaring rapid. It should not have both within the same scene. This work goes up and down with such an unsettling pace that everyone is seasick by the end.
Another problem with the film is in the concept of ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ that should occur within the framework of the picture. The concept is that the audience will buy what is presented on screen. It takes a mammoth amount of headshaking to believe that these crazed but attractive women could not find ‘the one’ in a city of eight million. They are way too pretty to be single for that long of a time. Alison Brie is best known from her role in the television show Community. She has been breaking into feature films in the last few years but doing mostly art house flicks. This work should build her a larger fan base. Her How to be Single role is equal parts charming and quirky, a mix that women will understand and men will fall for. Besides, she has the most expressive eyes in Hollywood.
Rebel Wilson is given the majority of the funny lines and they are both crude and unsettling. The trick with this kind of role is to be endearing while being outrageous. She has the latter but not the former. It feels like a bad impersonation of Melissa McCarthy. By the time the film unwinds, the audience is just glad to see her off the screen. Leslie Mann can do no wrong in every role she attempts. This is no different. One begins to wonder why her character was not a single focus; meaning why there was not a single movie based on a doctor wanting a kid. It would have made a more compelling motion picture experience.
How to be Single is not made for middle-aged males but for young women and the men who are dating them. They will find many similar circumstances that the characters endure or have endured in that time between graduation and finding ‘the one’ who they will start a family with. It is just not an experience for a wider audience and especially not for kids.
