MARCH 2008 Issue.pmd - RAG Magazine

the Romantic Comedy you shelled out ten dollars for. Butas we exit the theatres, let’s try and say something otherthan, “That was cute.”Definitely, Maybe: Written and Directed by Adam Brooks.Starring Ryan Reynolds, Abigail Breslin. MPAAClassification: PG-13 for sexual content including somefrank dialogue, language and smoking.○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○Definitely, MaybeBy Sam Osborn (www.themoviemammal.com)While staying within the fencing of its own genre, Definitely,Maybe tells a distinctly American story of adulthood,fatherhood, politics, and, of course, relationships. WillHayes (Ryan Reynolds), a successful Manhattan ad man,is implored by his daughter, Maya (Abigail Breslin of LittleMiss Sunshine fame) to explain the story of her conception.You see, Maya’s a fresh graduate of public education’sgrand sex ed program, and thus wildly curious about doingit. Not helping matters is the envelope landing on Will’sdesk containing his divorce papers. Guilty and defenselessagainst his daughter’s pleas, Will is harangued intorecounting the tale of meeting her mother. The catch is thatthere are three women involved, and Will mounts the storyup as a mystery for Maya where she must guess at the endof the tale which of the three women is her mom.The film is timely if not current, with Will spending much ofhis time scrambling through the nineties while writer/directorAdam Brooks draws neat parallels between the 1992 electionof President Clinton and the Democratic surge occurringas I write this. The political spin, along with all the othertangential interests of Definitely, Maybe, might comerandomly, but they also quietly work to make Will Hayesinto a kind of new Everyman for the American male. Thisunderstanding of, how should we put it, the male nationalconscious, is refracted then into the three women of hisromantic life: Emily (Elizabeth Banks) the college sweetheart,April (Isla Fisher) the wandering friend, and Summer(Rachel Weisz) the surreptitious workaholic. In working hisway through the tangled stories of all three, Mr. Brookscontains himself to the tools his genre. There are the sweetmonologues, guitar strums and orchestral hoorahs, thereare the last-scene kisses, and mid-movie break-ups. Nobeat is missed. But also strung effortlessly among thesefamiliar landmarks is a reminder that there are certain fewpeople in our lives who shape and define us. They areworth the love and the pain we invest into such relationships,and in some cases, they mean as much to the children thatare, by consequence, produced. Definitely, Maybe is stillCharlie BartlettBy Sam Osborn (www.themoviemammal.comSomebody asked Jon Poll, the first-time director of CharlieBartlett, how he’d chosen the script as his first project. “Well,”he said, “I read about a hundred scripts and narrowed it downto about two. The first was Charlie Bartlett, obviously. And theother was Juno.” He was confused when the audience laughed.He said, “What? What’s so funny?” Nobody could tell him, orhad the heart to tell him, that he’d made the wrong choice.Charlie Bartlett is a fine movie, but it’s not “the love song toteenagers” that Mr. Poll hails it as. It’s a film about kids that’swritten by adults. And though this is usually the case, the beststories about youth understand their subjects as their peerswould. Think Tina Fey’s playful satirizing of the high schoolexperience with Mean Girls, or Noah Baumbach’sunderstanding of divorce and brotherhood in The Squid andthe Whale. With Charlie Bartlett we get the feeling that it waswritten by the parents. And maybe that’s why the parents’ subplotsring more clearly than the teenagers’. Robert DowneyJr. as Principle Gardner and Hope Davis as Charlie’s momare both broken characters, struggling to stay afloat as theirchildren stir the waters they swim in. The main story, in whichCharlie (Anton Yelchin) finds popularity in bathroom-stallpsychology and prescription drug dealing is more of a cleverriff on Ferris Beuller’s Day Off than a smart swing at theRidalin and Zoloft-dazed generation of teenagers today.Charlie Bartlett: Directed by Jon Poll. Written by GustinNash. Starring Anton Yelchin, Kat Dennings, and RobertDowney Jr. Rated R for language, drug use, and brief nudity.www.RAGmagazine.com | 47