One Day
I, like many others, read David Nicholls book, ‘One Day’ and loved it. It’s funny and tragic at the same time with brilliantly drawn characters. And then they announce they’re making a film… well done, Mr. Nicholls, I thought, for getting to write the screenplay of your own book.
So I trek to my local multiplex, harboring doubts that Ann Hathaway will be able to cope with the northern English accent and with a little bit of skepticism that this book, with it’s strange ‘every St. Swithern’s day over twenty years’ structure will work as a film, but ultimately looking forward to seeing how he’s translated it to the screen.
But my, God, I was not expecting it to be one of the worst films I’ve seen in the cinema for a LONG TIME… like since the 1990s, since when I used to get dragged along to things like ‘Three Men, A Little Lady and Dog’ or whatever the limping end of that franchise was called.
Why do I feel One Day doesn’t work as a film?
The structure – one July day each year for twenty years is obviously going to present a challenge and a huge risk of mass exposition. While exposition isn’t so much of a problem, the opening ten minutes of the film are like a series of trailer moments, flying by at such a pace that I would be surprised if those who haven’t read the book had a clue what was going on. Who are these two people? And why and how do they stay in touch? The rambling letters that Emma send to Dex whilst he travelling and getting his end away around the world, and the brash postcards he sends back to her which helped establish their relationship to one another, are absent from the film. It moves at such a pace that you barely have chance to understand how the characters have got where they are in each scene. It feels like everything is rushed through in order for us to get to [SPOILER ALERT] the big ‘finally they get it on’ moment and then Emma’s untimely death.
I thought Hathaway’s accent was actually OK, but the acting is pretty wooden. They seem to monotonously reciting lines from the book in bars and holiday resorts with no atmosphere… and some of the best lines are left out. In fact, all the humor that was in the book has been drained out of the screenplay. I read that Dexter’s character, who is rather boorish and arrogant in the book, had to be toned down, as has Emma’s political firebrand northerner, as no one likes Bolshie women in film do they? So ‘Em and Dex’ are rather bland.
The cinematography is dodgy and the film looks cheap. There’s a scene where they are skinning dipping in France that reminded me of the cinematography quality in the micro-budget horror ‘Open Water’ and to be honest, a few sharks might have spiced things up a bit. Obviously all the budget went on Hathaway’s salary, meaning all non-UK locations in the book where changed to France – in the book they are skinny dipping in Greece and other scenes were set in Italy and India, but they don’t even have the imagination to pretend they’re in any of these places. It’s just France. Even the credits looked cheap.
All in all, it felt like this film had been rushed onto the screen; a scramble to make it on the back of the one million plus book sales, so all those one million odd readers will dutifully head down to their local multiplexes and pay out their hard-earned cash to watch it.
I think I’m going to have to watch two Michael Haneke films back to back this weekend to recover.
