Director: Adam Brooks
"Definitely, Maybe" tries to be a little more sophisticated than the average romantic comedy, but in doing so ends up a confused and confusing mess. That honesty is its undoing: the characters are all desperately looking for love and happiness within a fairy-tale film formula.
The story begins when Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) picks up his 11-year-old daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin) from school. Maya has just had a lesson in sex education and is full of tricky questions about her origins.
Will, who is at the point of divorcing his wife, then starts to explain to Maya about the three loves of his life. He changes their names so that Maya has to try and guess which one is her mother.
Will's reminiscences begin in 1992, back when he was an ambitious young man working on Bill Clinton's campaign team in New York. He plans to marry his girlfriend Emily (Elizabeth Banks) after the election, who stays behind in their idyllic little hometown, but he later dumps her after he finds out she slept with his roommate.
Will then stays on in New York and soon befriends April (Isla Fisher), a smart young woman who has no idea what she wants in life and who delivers an impressive rooftop tirade against the institution of marriage.
April loves Will but our fickle hero is more taken with Summer (Rachel Weisz), a brilliant academic who knows exactly what she wants.
And so the story slickly flits between past and present, with Maya making the occasional cutesy remark about her father's complex past. As time goes on, Will ends up alone and disillusioned with politics, love and life. Somewhat laughably, his newfound dissoluteness is linked with Bill Clinton's fall from grace through his legendary improprieties ("I never had sexual relations with that woman").
"Definitely, Maybe" is moderately entertaining for someone like me, perhaps because its timeline coincides with my own life. Being the same age as the main characters, I inevitably feel a certain senseless nostalgia for the '90s.
But the film's admirable attempt at emotional complexity is ruined by its utterly incongruous happy ending. There is a point, about 10 minutes before the end, where the story could have ended on a dignified note. But no, it just has to go on and have a happy ending, which feels about as natural in the circumstances as a syringe full of botox being injected into your face.
Opens March 7 in Estonia and Latvia, and March 28 in Lithuania.
