The premise of One True Loves is ripe for exploring various themes related to love, romance, marriage and commitment. It’s just a shame how the film turned out. Wedded screenwriters Taylor Jenkins Reid and Alex Jenkins Reid perhaps aren’t entirely at fault here, having adapted the former’s bestselling novel and afforded the material with an appreciable sincerity. The problem is in the imbalance of tone, courtesy of director Andy Fickman’s apparent insistence upon interjecting as much awkwardly placed humor as possible. It all begins rather swimmingly, with a pair of relationships forming a romantic triangle that, thankfully, isn’t subjected to the usual sources of false drama and manipulation. The premise, though, is a doozy.
Many years ago, Emma (Oona Yaffe) yearned for the classically handsome Jesse (Cooper van Grootel), while her best, secretly-in-love-with-her friend Sam (Phinehas Yoon) looked on in ever-silent jealousy. The former pair went off and built a life together, while the latter went his separate way entirely, and only through tragedy were Emma and Sam reunited. A decade later, Jesse (Luke Bracey), by then a documentarian, vanished at sea during a job, and Emma (Phillipa Soo), the sole heir to her father’s bookstore, was left in shambles and to a life of drudgery – one she never even considered for herself or her own happiness. By then, Sam (Simu Liu) had gone off on his own journey to become a musician, settling for teaching music to a bunch of half-interested high schoolers.
A smarter, better movie might have genuinely explored these dynamics of friendship and romance through the situation the arises out of this tragedy. Inevitably, Emma and Sam meet cute in a music shop a year after Jesse’s disappearance and presumed death and begin to build a new life for themselves after discovering that they might have been, at least a little bit, in love with each other all those years ago. The complication of Jesse’s return, after surviving more than three years on an otherwise uninhabited island, is a particularly loaded version of what Roger Ebert once called the Idiot Plot – the one where a movie’s characters could clear up a severe situation with an adult conversation and a lot of harsh truth.
To the credit of the Jenkins Reids and Fickman, here is a movie about building to the payoff of that Idiot Plot. The problem, of course, is that an Idiot Plot remains one, no matter how sincere the filmmakers’ approach will be, and no excuses can be made for the number of false starts, melodramatic misunderstandings and contrived reunions that exist here to get us to the reading of a letter that breaks someone’s heart before gently putting all the pieces of it back together with that harsh truth.
That scene, so well-played by Soo and her screen partner (whose name should not be mentioned, even though it wouldn’t come as too much of a surprise), simply comes too late for the movie’s many obvious issues to be fixed. One True Loves is devoted to devastating us with its central revelations and disarming us with its ill-fitted humor (Liu’s mugging turn as Sam really dampens whatever we’re supposed to take away from this character), instead of taking anything about its central scenario seriously.
Photo courtesy of The Avenue
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