One Day (Rhoades)

“One Day” Covers a Twenty-Year Romance
Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

As I was going through my first divorce I saw the movie “The Way We Were.” I bawled my eyes out as Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand played out this story of a star-crossed romance. I wished it had had a happier ending.

Now I’ve got my wish. Kinda.

“One Day” was a 2009 book by David Nicholls about a couple who spend one day with each other – July 15, 1988, their graduation from the University of Edinburgh – and form a lifelong friendship that eventually reveals itself as love.

That better-ending book has been made into a same-named movie, starring Anne Hathaway as the girl who dreams of making the world a better place and Jim Sturgess as the boy who sees the world as his oyster. “One Day” is currently winning hearts at the Tropic Cinema.
Remember that scene in “The Way We Were,” where Streisand says, “Wouldn't it be lovely if we were old? We'd have survived all this. Everything thing would be easy and uncomplicated; the way it was when we were young.” Well, here we see Emma and Dexter (Hathaway and Sturgess) survive all this.

In “One Day” the next two decades of their lives are a series of July 15ths, experiencing friendship through thick and thin. And with a happier ending. Although I would have felt sad over all the time lost in the intervening years.

Some moviegoers have compared it to a more serious “When Harry Met Sally.” The Times deflected that comparison, calling it “wise, funny, perceptive, compassionate and often unbearably sad.”
Writer David Nicholls ascribes a more sober influence, saying he was inspired by the novels of Thomas Hardy.

Anne Hathaway doesn’t see “One Day” as a typical rom-com where “people meet in really unbelievable ways, and then they fall in love in about three weeks, and then they fight, and then somebody chases somebody across Manhattan and then they kiss, and that’s the end of the story. This movie allows these characters to get to know each other a really long time. So when they say they love each other, when they admit to it, you believe them, they’ve earned it. I think this is a movie where the characters earn your belief in their love.”

Of course, everyone knows adorable doe-eyed Anne Hathaway. Heck, she even co-hosted the Oscars this year. Here, this New Jersey girl perfects a Yorkshire accent for the role.
English actor Jim Sturgess may be less familiar, unless you saw him in “Across the Universe,” a musical that features 34 Beatles songs as its romantic backdrop. His accent comes naturally.
So what’s the message in “One Day”? As Anne Hathaway puts it, “There’s something very nice about getting older and realizing that getting it together is something you do over the course of your entire life. Once you start to relax, everything gets a lot more fun.”

I couldn’t agree more.

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]