Lola Versus
At the moment, there are few greater clichés in the media than the freaking out single woman on the cusp of 30. Of course, clichés are clichés for a reason, worth exploring even through the lens of just one or two women as in Lola Versus. Unfortunately, while the intention behind Lola Versus isn't that we should all be happily married by the age of 30, it still fits into the same rubric of all those "Why You're Not Married" books.
Lola (Greta Gerwig) has a gorgeous fiancé Luke (Joel Kinnaman), and they live in a giant loft together, the kind of dreamy NYC real estate that seems to exist primarily in the movies. Just as they're planning their gluten-free wedding cake with a non-GMO rice milk-based frosting, Luke dumps her. It's cruelly sudden — although Luke isn't a cruel man. Lola finds little comfort in the acerbic wit of her best friend, the eternally single Alice (Zoe Lister-Jones) who is probably delighted to see her perfectly blonde best friend taken down a peg and into the murky world of New York coupling. Lola and Luke share a best friend, Henry (Hamish Linklater), a messy-haired, rumpled sweetheart who is kind and safe and the inevitable shelter for Lola's fallout. Her parents, well-meaning and well-to-do hippie types, feed her kombucha and try to figure out their iPads and give her irrelevant advice.
Lola Versus is slippery. Its tone careens between broad TV comedy and earnest dramedy, almost as if Alice is in charge of the dirty zingers and Lola's job is to make supposedly introspective statements. Alice's vulgar non-sequiturs are tossed off without much relish, and Lola's dialogue comes off too often as expository and plaintive. We don't need Lola to tell Henry, "I'm vulnerable, I'm not myself, I'm easily persuaded" or "I'm slutty but I'm a good person!" (Which is, by the way, an asinine statement to make. One might even say she's not even that "slutty," she's just making dumb decisions that hurt those around her just as much as she's hurting herself.)
We know that she's a mess — that's the point of the story! It's not so much that a particularly acerbic woman wouldn't say to her best friend, "Find your spirit animal and ride it until its d**k falls off," but that she wouldn't say it in the context of this movie. It's from some other movie over there, one where everyone is as snarky and bitter as Alice. You can't have your black-hearted comedy and your introspective yoga classes. Is it really a stride forward for feminism that the clueless single woman has taken the place of the stoner man-child in media today? When Lola tells Luke, "I'm taken by myself. I've gotta just do me for a while," it's true. But it doesn't sound true, and it doesn't feel true.
In one scene, Lola stumbles on the sidewalk and falls to the ground. No one asks her if she's okay or needs help; she simply gets up on her own and goes on her way. It's a moment that has happened to so many people. It's humiliating and so very public, but of course you just gotta pick yourself up and get where you're going. In this movie, it's a head-smackingly obvious metaphor. In one of the biggest missteps of the movie, Jay Pharoah plays a bartender that makes the occasional joke while Lola is waiting tables at her mom's restaurant. His big line at the end is, "And I'm your friend who's black!" It would have been better to leave his entire character on the cutting room floor than attempt such a half-hearted wink at the audience.
Lister-Jones and director Daryl Wein co-wrote the screenplay for Lola Versus, as they did with 2009's Breaking Upwards. Both films deal with the ins and outs of their own romantic relationship in one way or another. Breaking Upwards, a micro-budget indie about a rough patch in their relationship, was much more successful in tone and direction. Lola Versus has its seeds in Lister-Jones' experience as a single woman in New York and is a little bit farther removed from their experiences. Lola Versus feels like a wasted opportunity. Relatively speaking, there are so few movies getting made with a female writer or co-writer that it almost feels like a betrayal to see such a tone-deaf portrayal of women onscreen. What makes it even more disappointing is how smart and likable everyone involved is and knowing that they could have made a better movie.