It’s a truth universally accepted that time passes far too quickly. One should hope that such a sensation isn’t as literal as what happens to the protagonist of Long Story Short, which operates in the tradition of modern movie fables. The most popular of these featured a cynical weatherman trapped in a single day as it looped for the equivalent of months on end, and now we have writer/director Josh Lawson’s film, in which a man learns a similar lesson of humility and gratefulness by jumping forward one year of his life after a few minutes spent in part of the timeline.
This seems to occur over the equivalent course of a few hours for Teddy (Rafe Spall), a slightly self-obsessed man who could probably use this type of lesson in his life. In the opening scene, he Meets Cute with Leanne (Zahra Newman) at a party, kissing her accidentally when her outfit matches that of the woman he’s supposed to meet, and it’s off to the races for both of them. The attraction is undeniable, the physical chemistry is heated, and the marriage is surprisingly soon for such a young relationship. But no sooner has a mutual loved one died than a complete stranger (Noni Hazlehurst) gifts – or curses, depending on one’s outlook – Teddy with that mystical time-hopping ability.
He falls asleep on the night of their wedding ceremony and wakes up to find Leanne 18 weeks pregnant. When his reality dissolves and returns, their daughter is now a toddler, and Leanne has grown tired of his absentee parenting strategy. One wonders what Teddy might be like from the perspective of his wife, his bemused best friend Sam (Ronny Chieng), and old flame Becka (Dena Kaplan), with whom he enters an on-again-off-again relationship as things turn sour with Leanne. Lawson’s screenplay, though, is more about accepting the logic of this situation, for the sake of the perceptive human comedy that arises, than scrutinizing it. The whole set-up doesn’t quite make sense, except where it counts – and that counts for quite a lot.
The reason is simple: We like Teddy. Despite his occasionally pompous nature, he’s an easily sympathetic individual, but like all of us, he has some hang-ups in need of his attention. Spall’s performance is part of the reason for this, but it’s also in the way Lawson builds this scenario, which forces Teddy and us to compartmentalize an emotional response in order to prepare for whatever might come next. Some problems arise from this method of storytelling, such as how a health crisis for Sam goes unaddressed until two time-jump cycles later. That seems an acceptable sacrifice for the film’s emotional integrity as a whole, though. After all, a fable does not need to be subtle.
The result is a very funny comedy that mines its laughs from the absurdity of Teddy’s situation and a moving character study that, when concluding this story, finds a brilliant method of splitting the difference in answering the audience member’s inevitable question of what, precisely, is going on in Long Story Short. The final scenes play out as one might expect from a fable like this one, with Teddy’s reality snapping back into place, but one of the pleasures of this lovely film is that this ending is intentionally ambiguous. Teddy is a different person by the end of whatever he has experienced, and we actually feel that change take shape.
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