Every director reaches the stage where their middle-aged life becomes the narrative of the movies they make. Jay Roach has seemed to reach this midlife crisis stage that reflects the story he’s decided to direct, here Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Coleman star as a couple attempting to stay in love when money and age don’t want the same thing from them.
The film gets better the further it gets into it. When the main stars are free to play off each other, you feel the fractions between them like their your own parents. If anything a stage play with both of them would’ve been a better drawn out idea, the world around them seems to be what ruins it. In their young life they decide to move to the United States, and this is where it starts to feel like a US remake of an English sitcom which also includes actors from both sides of the pond. They are included for the easy one-liners and even create the tedious plot points of the story, but theres no chemistry with them and the main actors who you feel have just met on the first day of shooting. These people have no impact on the inter-dynamic relationship between the two main characters so it leads you to think they should’ve either created a plot where they were more key or just get rid of them altogether.
It takes a while for the film to find the potential in Cumberbatch and Coleman as well. Early on the comedy comes from the least comedic set ups possible, which they then reflect on in the next scene. To give an example, Coleman names her restaurant ‘We’ve Got Crabs’. A joke so bad that it didn’t need explaining by Cumberbatch in the next scene, but for some reason this is what happens. When the film reaches the stage of being charming, maybe not quite funny but charming, is later when its just them two in a scene on their own. You feel like they’ve known each other for a lifetime, and coming from a theatre background for both of them definitely helped with this.
You need to strip back everything to get to anything of worth here. Stature is another element that punches you in the face while the two of them whisper in your ear a joke. The characters want you to care for them as they want to be seen and loved. At the same time they are unrelatable to the every day person both in how rich they are and also the out of touch way they live their lifestyles. Of course films don’t have to be relatable to me or any person walking down the street, it just feels like a film too connected to the directors/writers background to really connect with the every day persons hardship in the face of turmoil. Jay Roach’s directing style when he was younger is more slapstick and irreverent. But now that he’s big time and middle aged, its harder to go to more realistic style of comedy that alienates a lot of its possible audience.