'Say When' - Review

Rebranded from original title Laggies (most likely because no-one outside the US has any idea what that means), Say When is a romantic comedy featuring Keira Knightley as Megan, a twenty-something layabout who has a quarter-life crisis when her long-suffering boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber) proposes to her out of the blue. Taking an opportunity to escape, under the guise of attending a skills seminar, Megan makes a new friend in the form of Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz) and hides out in her house, encountering world-weary single Dad Craig (Sam Rockwell) along the way.

With a cast made up of such Hollywood royalty, it’s no surprise that Say When holds itself with more than a little style and vigour, with the three leads keeping the tone light and energetic. Keira Knightley manages to surpass my usual problems with her – predominantly that I forgot I was actually watching a Keira Knightley performance – while Chloë Grace Moretz’ sparky, likeable teenage deviant is more than enough penance for the crime that was If I Stay. Sam Rockwell, who hasn’t really had an awful lot to do since Moon is perfectly believable as the ‘cool’ but troubled Dad and manages to keep divergences into Iron Man 2 levels of annoyance down to a minimum.

If only the side characters were half as likeable. Though I understand that the in-laws and the close friends are intentionally annoying to convey how much Megan feels the need to escape, there is a line that needs to be drawn because these are people that are not quite off-beat enough to be Frank, but just annoying enough that it became a problem. Another problem is that when the leads fall into their problems and predicaments, I somehow ended up feeling more sympathetic to the irritating sideshows.

I think this is partly to do with the ‘first-world problem’ nature of the script and also that the female characters don’t do particularly well in terms of Bechdel-test: we are talking about the story in which the lost and woebegone female lead is ultimately at the behest of the two males of the story, rather than the young girl who she befriends. The ever-present ‘model village’ nature of the rom-com is still prevalent, and it’s really beginning to bother me how little film-makers notice that non-one wakes up from a night of drunk misdemeanours with their hair and make-up perfectly intact, which clashes horribly with the photorealistic aesthetic of the cinematography.

Story-wise, the first half sacrifices narrative coherence for the sake of laughs, which means that as it pulls itself and the various plot threads back together the laughs begin to whittle down. While I realise that – as a late teenage male – I’m not the target demographic, the noticeable lack of laughter from the mostly female audience at my particular screening as the film entered the third act is an inherent problem. While the nippy length might require laughter packed in as much as possible, the film felt very front-loaded with the ending going off on what – I think the director thought – was a more emotional tangent.

Though studded with likeable stars and innately good-natured, Say When falls flat upon irritating side characters and off-beat sensibilities, with the audience wondering why they bothered with the name change at all, because it makes even less sense than the original. A great deal of US critics have really taken against it, and while I’m not a fan, I don’t think it’s a hateful film, just unforgivably forgettable.

★★☆☆☆