After spending four years with her cardiologist boyfriend Jeremy (Adam Scott), Boston real estate stager (she supplies the props for realtors) Anna (Amy Adams) is dismayed by the fact he still hasn’t proposed. Taking matters in her own hands, the woman follows her boyfriend to a medical convention in Dublin so she can instead propose to him on leap day, an old Irish tradition her father Jack (John Lithgow) has talked about many times in the past.
Matthew Goode and Amy Adams in Universal Pictures' Leap Year
Complications arise when a freak storm forces her plane out of the air leaving her stranded in the middle of nowhere. With only days left to reach her destination, find a suitable ring and surprise Jeremy with her proposal, Anna employs down on his luck Irish bar owner Declan (Matthew Goode) to transport her to Dublin. But the journey is a wild and wooly one, and before the bickering pair realizes it feelings might be passing between them putting the point of the entire trip in serious jeopardy.
This is the point where I am going to film critic purgatory. Not only is the new romantic comedy Leap Year born out of a despicable woman-hating premise too horrific to spend much time talking about, additionally there are at least another two or three scenes of such poor taste I almost don’t even know where to begin. Screenwriters Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont mine a well they already sucked dry with abhorrent Made of Honor, the pair quickly proving they have no business crafting scripts for this particular genre whatsoever.
Yet, somehow, someway, I liked Leap Year. Heck, there were moments where I maybe even downright loved it. While every fiber of my being was pleading me to feel otherwise, I actually got a tiny bit swept up in Anna and Declan’s whirlwind romance. For all the contrivances, the idiocies and the scenes of pure unabashed tedium to pair won my over, the sight of them together filling my heart with just enough joy I was ready to forgive much that I normally wouldn’t.
Credit for this is twofold. First, of course, are actors Adams and Goode. By and large both decide to play things close to the vest, eschewing the normal mugging and scenery chewing films of this type have sadly become known for. Instead these two go back to a style that’s as old as Cary Grant and Irene Dunne discovering The Awful Truth, and while I’m not about to say what they do here is as timeless or as classic as what occurred in that 1937 effort the fact they’ve got me thinking that way hopefully speaks volumes.
The second person I give credit to is director Anand Tucker. I may have had issues with both When Did You Last See Your Father? and Shopgirl but that doesn’t mean I think any less of the man’s directorial style. He makes movies with subtlety and restraint, refusing to bow to convention even when those around him are probably hoping he’ll follow the tried and true (and boringly cliché) playbook. He populates his movies with real people, not glamour queens and six-pack studs, grounding things in a concrete reality that makes them relatable even when the script sadly lets him down.
That’s especially true in many ways here. Not only is the premise itself borderline offensive, Kaplan and Elfont dream up a couple of moments where I almost wanted to stand up in the theater and scream. There is an impromptu bit at an Irish wedding that begins promisingly enough, Anna and Declan gently and honestly learning things about one another that endears the pair together even more. But with a brash and brutal suddenness things devolve into a horrid mishmash of absurdity and violence, the screenwriters once again turning their heroine into a misanthropic nincompoop I’d normally never want to spend time with.
It doesn’t help at all that Jeremy is a complete waste as a character. For the conceit to slightly work one has to see why Anna is so infatuated with him, and while I do realize it is the character’s obsession with perfection and order that drives her a little chemistry between the two would have been nice. Instead nothing materializes, nothing at all, and when things finally dawn for the heroine the only response I had sitting in the theater was to let out a quiet yawn attempting to stifle my boredom.
In spite of all this I still enjoyed the movie. The scenes that worked for me, like one near the end concerning a fire alarm, worked beautifully, and where Adams and Scott shared no chemistry the amount of it passing between her and Goode was positively voluminous. Their coming together may be forgone and contrived but that doesn’t mean I didn’t want it any less, and while some will undoubtedly wish Anna would just jump off an Irish cliff all I wanted her to do was give the starry-eyed bar owner a great big kiss.
Make no mistake, this movie is a poorly written mess reveling in cliché. It has scenes that scrape the bottom barrel while its premise is as insulting as any a romantic comedy has ever had the temerity to offer. Be that as it may, thanks to the strength of the two leads and the gloriously relaxed restraint employed by director Tucker I ended up enjoying the darn thing even when I knew I should have been feeling otherwise. Like I said, I’m going to film critic purgatory, and based on my reaction to Leap Year I’m not entirely sure that sentence wouldn’t be justified.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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