K-SCORE: 51
Writer/Director: Josh Boone
Starring: Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, Lily Collins, Nat Wolff, Logan Lerman, Kristen Bell, Liana Liberato
Spoiler Level: Minor
Writers writing about writing tend to bother me, partly because I find it to be a fundamental failure in creativity, partly because I never want to see the art of writing novels go the way of theater (where only theater people talk about theater, perform theater, and pay to see theater), and partly because I usually wholly disagree with the philosophies espoused by writer characters. Stuck in Love, amazingly, didn’t bother me tremendously despite that it’s the story of an entire family of writers. Their philosophies on storytelling go largely unexplored, which is better than poorly explored, and apart from Greg Kinnear’s character Bill once yelling at his kids that they “are writers” as if he means genetically, I didn’t find the writing content horrifying. There’s no nonsense about “writers have something in their souls that makes them different” or anything like that.
The reason I didn’t like Stuck in Love is because they treat publishing like it it’s a babystep. As if the hard part is summoning the willpower to write in the first place; you’re destined to write something brilliant and getting people to read it, getting Stephen King to give you a call and praise it, is easy. That… that has not been my experience. I can’t get the agent who is responsible for tying America to a wall and ravaging the populous with Fifty Shades of Grey to give me any more attention than having her assistant’s assistant send me a form rejection email. Also offensive to me is that it rigidly sticks to the belief that love and success are part of your destiny, so you just have to wait for the right moment. If that’s the case, the gorgeous 25-year-old heiress to the Penguin Publishing fortune, who likes science-fiction, fantasy, Golden Retrievers, and pessimism should be spilling her wine on me at a party any day now, then quickly telling me I can get a new shirt on her father’s megayacht if I’ll just follow her. What happened to the Bill story where he waits and waits and waits for his ex-wife to come back to him and she never does, or worse, does briefly when she’s lonely and sad, fucks him, and then leaves him again in even more crippling pain than before, and then he kills himself. Then his son takes to drinking and gambling away a large inheritance he was too young to responsibly utilize. Then when he winds up in jail. The daughter turns to prostitution to pay off the son’s bookie, until she’s so miserable that heroin becomes her only answer. Huh, film? Feel stuck in love now, motherfucker?
The film’s alright I guess. The character motivations make sense, the family doesn’t have too much trouble communicating which is usually the only driving force for familial conflict that screenwriters can ever come up with, and the diverse stories of all the members are pleasantly intertwined. The title is awful, but I assume some producer hammered it on with a rusty nail when everything was finished. Same thing happened to Edge of Tomorrow and Love Actually. The film only suffers a bit from that though. Still, it can’t be a good sign that I wanted to read the character Rusty’s short story more than I wanted to watch the conclusion.