In the film One Day, Dex (Jim Sturgess) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) spend an awkward night together after their graduation from the University of Edinburgh. He is the cad who has always had it easy – because he came from money and because he’s smooth and good looking. She is more of a wall flower, studious, Jane Eyre-reading type, so they do not seem to be a match; something he lets her know by asking if they can just sleep/cuddle (which foreshadows the years of disappointment this boy will provide for this girl). Though they weren’t friends, they were loosely part of the same circle in college. They spend some time together the next day (though the movie doesn’t cover that until a flashback at the end) and connect on a certain level. From this incident, set in 1988, the movie follows the couple for twenty years, checking in on the exact date that their first encounter took place. Because the movie didn’t show that next day until the end, a moviegoer who hadn’t read the book (I have – it’s terrific) might be confused as to why they kept in touch after that awkward night. I was glad to have the nuances of the book in my head to aid in my viewing of the movie, but as always, having read the book gives one certain narrative expectations.
Anne Hathaway plays Emma, and I say she did what she could without having been born English or less pretty (it’s hard to buy her as an awkward girl). Some will have (and have) problems with her accent. Might this have been a better movie if an English actress had been cast? Probably. I had been sticking up for Hathaway’s accent, because I thought she was going for a Scottish accent, but then I heard her say in an interview that her character was from Leeds, when I had thought she was from Scotland due to the Edinburgh connection. Either way, I think she did an admirable job considering, and critics most always are underwhelmed by Americans in English films so she was never going to make everybody happy.
Jim Sturgess steps right out of the book to play Dexter. This actor should be on some radars after this performance. He plays the hard-drinking, selfish lad well, but what is really impressive is how he showed the growth of his character during those twenty years. I didn’t get that from Hathaway – she did not seem to age as his character did, which is likely the fault of the writer and director more so than the actor as the movie really favored the Dex storyline and glossed over Emma’s. Dex has an arc in the book and the movie but Emma’s, while well told in the book, doesn’t get the proper play here. We see her during her awkward post-college years wasting her time waitressing, but her teaching and writing careers (she becomes a successful young adult novelist) are barely touched. Her moving to Paris, putting in the time, dating a French man and becoming successful – only to ditch her Francophile fantasies for Dex – is all but a blip on screen. If they were worried about time, they could’ve cut one of the Dex drunk scenes (you get the point after one) in favor of a little more Emma.
One Day the film does capture one theme of the novel very well – the relationship between Dex and his mother (played fantastically by Patricia Clarkson). She has cancer, and Dex, in his worst years of being a self-centered and shallow television host, is not very sensitive to her needs. The scene where he goes to her house and she tells him that though she’ll always love him (she doesn’t “like” him) is heart-breaking and extremely well done.
Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess in One Day. © 2011 – Focus Features.
Visually, the movie is appealing, capturing the European travels Emma and Dex embark on (the scene of them skinny dipping at night is nice), as well as the flashy London scenes from the MTV-esque shows that Dex works on, to when he visits her in France. The skinny-dippping scene really captured the friendship/love between these two, and how important it is to be in the same place for a romance to work (they were not). Hathaway’s face properly displays the pain of a girl who is told over and over that she is just friend material by a guy who, in his 20s, is just not a giver. She loves him anyway, and he obviously loves her.
One Day is not your typical love story, so moviegoers should not expect that. They do “meet cute” but it’s not smooth sailing from there. They grow together, the path is interesting, and there is tragedy in spades, which I will not spoil. Director Lone Scherfig will not get the kudos she did for her An Education, but she and Nicholls did an admirable job of re-creating the book for the screen, though it remains uneven.
