The Reel Critic: The One I Love

The first round of class assignments and some surprisingly brisk weather have ushered in the fall semester more quickly than many of us would have liked. However, before you send a fifth email to that professor who won’t let you into their class or get geared up to find new ways to procrastinate (read: finding new ways to procrastinate is procrastinating), take a few minutes to read about my favorite movie of the summer season. **Spoiler alert** It’s not Sex Tape.

Summer 2014 was marked by blockbuster sequels (22 Jump Street, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), epic indies (Snowpiercer, Boyhood), and a standout performance from a beloved actor gone too soon (Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man). In spite of all these notable flicks, my favorite of the summer received half the buzz, in part because of its late August 22nd release, and boasts a total of three onscreen acting credits. Despite its late release and small cast, The One I Love, director Charlie McDowell’s debut feature, is a smartly stylized and consistently surprising 91 minute gem and my favorite movie of the summer.

I was drawn to the film mostly because I’ve been bingeing on Mad Men and would have been excited to watch anything with actress Elizabeth Moss’s name attached to it. The fact that it was being pegged as a romantic comedy-science fiction-mystery-drama had me even more intrigued. It’s a hard film to go into detail about without ruining the ‘twist,’ so bear with me and really just go see the damn thing (it’s streaming on Amazon and iTunes).

The film opens with Ethan (Mark Duplass) in voiceover describing “the greatest night of his life.” His story involves an impulsive first date with wife-to-be spent pool-hopping and falling in love. As we listen, we watch the couple on-screen driving at night and sneaking around the outside of a house, presumably acting out the events of the narrated story. However, the eerie visual tone, with an emphasis on emptiness and shadows that will become recurring motifs throughout, seems incongruous with the magical spontaneity of the couple’s recited origin story. It turns out the onscreen couple is acting out the narrated story - just not in the way you immediately think.

Longtime couple Ethan and Sophie (Elizabeth Moss) are actually in marriage counseling telling this story to their therapist (Ted Danson, who happens to be Director McDowell’s stepdad). We learn that the Ethan and Sophie we saw sneaking through the bushes were attempting, and failing, to recreate a moment in their relationship from long ago when they were truly happy. As if the uncomfortably long time the camera stays on the couple treading water in their reenactment isn’t enough, we get a few unnecessary lines like “it’s a little colder than I remember” in reference to the pool water, and “happy anniversary anyway,” to really hammer home just how far this relationship has fallen.

I love this opening sequence because by the time the movie title appears on screen just two minutes and eighteen seconds in, we already know everything necessary about Ethan and Sophie’s relationship. For the rest of the film you don’t learn much else. Sure, you find out that Ethan cheated on Sophie and that they once did ecstasy at Lollapalooza, but as movie-goers and human beings we are so familiar with the trajectory of this relationship that any new information we learn about it is perfunctory. The familiarity of the The One I Love’s central relationship allows the film to explore its central question more effectively: what happens to an ordinary relationship when tested under remarkable circumstances?

The tired circumstances that lead Ethan and Sophie to take their therapist’s advice and go on a retreat to a secluded vacation home elevate the impact of the surreal, Charlie Kaufman-esque plot elements that threaten to fracture their bond once on the retreat. We have seen these characters and this relationship before, just not under these circumstances.

Yet nothing is taken as a given. Moss and Duplass shine in their roles as bewildered husband and wife trying to figure out what is going on while simultaneously trying to repair their relationship. They serve as believable proxies for viewers’ own investigations of the plot. Thankfully, the film’s surreal plot-devices are only ever relevant to the extent that they allow Sophie and Ethan to develop as characters. And as far as character driven films go, screenwriter Justin Lader gives this one a great sense of forward motion. It never feels dull or circular - an accomplishment considering how many times the characters enter and exit the same sets.

At times The One I Love felt like a horror movie due to the film’s use of obstructed perspective shots and the prominence of empty spaces. Other times Moss and Duplass provide welcome comedic relief. The genre-bending film is a perfect balance of the familiar and the unknown, both from stylistic and narrative perspectives, and the product is a work that seems both emotionally authentic and technically fresh. Everything from performance down to set design seems absolutely essential to the narrative. While Boyhood was impressive in scope and ultra-relevant (especially to us college kids), no film accomplished so much with so little this past summer as did The One I Love.