Comet (15.)
Directed by Sam Esmail. Starring Justin Long and Emmy Rossum. 91 mins
The job of a film director is knowing how to coax bright ideas away from their natural habitat, on paper, and getting them to bed down in the awkward and far less forgiving terrain of the screen. Comet, a philosophical romcom set “a few parallel universes over” is packed with great ideas that haven’t survived transit. At first you wince sadly at the smart lines and inventive touches that just narrowly fail to connect. As time passes you may find yourself growing increasingly contemptuous of their lemming-like endeavours.
Comet is set up like a double hander multiverse Groundhog Day. We jump around during the six year relationship between Dell (Long) and Kimberley (Rossum) as they meet up, break up and get back together. Constantly the audience is prodded (a little to forcefully) not to accept the reality of what they are seeing. Is it all a dream, the life flashing before the eyes of a dying man, or are e flipping between different parallel universes?
The quantum mechanics of it all gets to bit wearing after a while, probably because the two leading characters never really win us over. Long seems to have co-opted Robert Downey Jr’s voice to play a Cumberbatch version of Sherlock Holmes - a cynical charmless know-it-all. Trying to get back with Kimberley he says of his objectionable character traits that, “I thought you'd find them endearing, like Don Rickles or Mussolini,” which is a perfect example of the kind of writing that may have seem clever when they were hawking the script but when delivered by an actor lingers in the air for a second or two, making everybody feel awkward.
Rossum looks like Penelope Cruz made up to play an Zooey Deschanel-type: an archetypal indie film male fantasy figure. The whole film is these two people, but we still only get his version of her.
It’s a shame because in places it comes so close to being wonderful. There must be a parallel universe where it is an absolute gem. Maybe in that world I have written a less clichéd ending to this review.
Directed by Sam Esmail. Starring Justin Long and Emmy Rossum. 91 mins
The job of a film director is knowing how to coax bright ideas away from their natural habitat, on paper, and getting them to bed down in the awkward and far less forgiving terrain of the screen. Comet, a philosophical romcom set “a few parallel universes over” is packed with great ideas that haven’t survived transit. At first you wince sadly at the smart lines and inventive touches that just narrowly fail to connect. As time passes you may find yourself growing increasingly contemptuous of their lemming-like endeavours.
Comet is set up like a double hander multiverse Groundhog Day. We jump around during the six year relationship between Dell (Long) and Kimberley (Rossum) as they meet up, break up and get back together. Constantly the audience is prodded (a little to forcefully) not to accept the reality of what they are seeing. Is it all a dream, the life flashing before the eyes of a dying man, or are e flipping between different parallel universes?
The quantum mechanics of it all gets to bit wearing after a while, probably because the two leading characters never really win us over. Long seems to have co-opted Robert Downey Jr’s voice to play a Cumberbatch version of Sherlock Holmes - a cynical charmless know-it-all. Trying to get back with Kimberley he says of his objectionable character traits that, “I thought you'd find them endearing, like Don Rickles or Mussolini,” which is a perfect example of the kind of writing that may have seem clever when they were hawking the script but when delivered by an actor lingers in the air for a second or two, making everybody feel awkward.
Rossum looks like Penelope Cruz made up to play an Zooey Deschanel-type: an archetypal indie film male fantasy figure. The whole film is these two people, but we still only get his version of her.
It’s a shame because in places it comes so close to being wonderful. There must be a parallel universe where it is an absolute gem. Maybe in that world I have written a less clichéd ending to this review.
