Movie Review: Un Amour comme ça

By Allison Benedikt, Chicago Tribune Movie Critic

1-1/2 stars

"A Lot Like Love" is a poor man's "When Harry Met Sally," with Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet in the dull and familiar roles of strangers who become acquaintances who become friends who become fools in love - all over the course of seven long, extremely long, unnecessarily long years.

Oliver first meets Emily on a flight from LAX to NYC when she barges in on his bathroom break and together they become the newest members of the least exclusive club in the sky. Later, having gone their separate ways - Oliver to visit his deaf brother and Emily to visit her mother's grave - the one-flight-standers bump into each other randomly in the Village and spend the day footloose and fancy free, taking self-portraits with Oliver's camera and throwing back shots at a local pub.

Since opposites attract, Oliver and Emily are just that. Fresh out of college, Oliver is a young man with a business plan (for an online diaper service) and the naivete to believe it will yield riches and love. Emily is director Nigel Cole's ("Saving Grace," "Calendar Girls") picture of pierced punk perfection: an impulsive free spirit whose unusual beauty is all the more stunning after a hard day of hard drinking.

As Emily ages, Peet gets better and better at playing her, in part because their ages converge but more because the young Emily is near impossible to grasp. Truly a figment of the male imagination, Emily ends the Manhattan not-a-date with the words, "Go. You'll ruin it," as if it's totally natural to talk in precious verbal cues, ones that say both "I'm a drifter who loves fleeting moments" and "Stay." Screenwriter Colin Patrick Lynch uses this cutesy line every time Oliver and Emily reunite - without it we'd surely forget their previous meetings. He also likes to time-stamp each reunion with cultural references, my favorite being "I'm sure the Internet is going to be huge," which Emily says to Oliver at the pub upon hearing about his diaper dot-com plan - because nothing says 1998 like a reference to the approaching Internet boom.

Over the next seven years, Emily and Oliver occasionally meet up for sex and companionship. In 2001, Emily asks Oliver out for New Year's Eve the night before he is to move to San Francisco and finally start his startup. All grown out of the leather and lace-up boots, Emily is now a struggling actress recovering from a bad breakup (fitted in a bad wig that's supposed to signify the new millennium). And Oliver is Ashton Kutcher.

Two years later after his own bad breakup, Oliver finds himself on Emily's doorstep, and the two take a desert road trip, during which they eat Cheetos, laugh with their mouths open and pose naked for Emily's camera (Cole's version of Meg Ryan's diner orgasm, I guess). Emily is now a successful photographer, Oliver is Ashton Kutcher and, lest you get ahead of the plot, they are still not in love. Just friends - very, very close friends who at this point have seen each other three times in their entire lives.

A year after that (2004, for those counting) there's another meeting. I've lost track of who precipitated this time around, but I'm pretty sure Emily is now engaged (to Jeremy Sisto's character), and Oliver sings Bon Jovi to win her affection (Cole's version of Billy Crystal's "Surrey With the Fringe on Top," I guess).

Most offensive are not these ridiculous and contrived rendezvous, but the notion that from them is supposed to come a true friendship, one that may or may not slip into the big l-o-v-e, depending on timing and circumstances and a whole host of external factors. All the while we are to believe that love is unstoppable, knows no bounds, conquers all. Love is many things, but it can't be both a choice and an imperative at the same time.

Despite all this fakery, Peet manages to emerge unscathed, effervescent (but not bubbly), intelligent (but not ponderous), neurotic (but not really neurotic). And Kutcher remains Kutcher - a plateau that, remarkably, continues to get him cast in major motion pictures and prevents us from ever believing in the central friendship of "A Lot Like Love."

Maybe Kutcher, Cole and Lynch are just students of film history, understanding better than any of us that, in the words of Harry Burns, men and women can't be friends - because the sex part always gets in the way.

So why even try?

"A Lot Like Love"

Directed by Nigel Cole; written by Colin Patrick Lynch; photographed by John De Borman; edited by Susan Littenberg; production designed by Tom Meyer; music by Alex Wurman; produced by Armyan Bernstein and Kevin Messick. A Touchstone Pictures and Beacon Pictures release; opens Friday, April 22. Running time: 1:37. MPAA rating: PG-13 (sexual content, nudity and language).

Emily Friehl - Amanda Peet

Oliver Martin - Ashton Kutcher

Ellen Martin - Taryn Manning

Jeeter - Kal Penn

Ben Miller - Jeremy Sisto