Aubrey MaloneSay When (15A)
The idea of a woman discovering she’s about to marry the wrong man at the gates of the church is old hat in movies. It gets a different spin here by being tagged on to a rite-of-passage theme featuring two dovetailed generations.
Out-of-work graduate Megan (Keira Knightley) spends most of her time either loafing around or ‘sign flipping’ for her father’s tax consultancy firm. Her friends, meanwhile, have either married and/or gone on to upwardly mobile careers.
Will she do either of these things? It’s unlikely. She prefers to ‘float’ and ‘drift’. When her boyfriend proposes to her at one of these weddings, she panics.
She takes a ‘time-out’ from her life when she finds her father cheating on her mother at the same wedding. An accidental encounter with a group of youths shortly afterwards leads to her leaving her past life behind. She has a pivotal week in which she bonds with the youths, in particular the 16-year-old Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz), at whose home she decamps.
The film is at its most wobbly here, especially after she becomes romantically involved with Annika’s father Craig (Sam Rockwell), a divorced attorney.
Megan becomes a kind of mentor to Annika, who’s struggling with her feelings about boys as well as trying to deal with her parent’s divorce. She doesn’t realise Megan’s love life is also at a crossroads.
Knightley’s attempt to usurp the kind of ‘trendy bohemian’ role Audrey Hepburn fine-tuned in films like Breakfast at Tiffany’s is only partly successful in the present venture. It’s at its best when it’s lampooning Megan’s hysterical friend Alison (Ellie Kemper) and at its worst when it tries to create Megan as a marriage counsellor-cum-youth leader, two roles she’s ill-equipped to fill.
Cliches
Say When is awash with clichés (The Alienated Child, The Dopey Boyfriend) and there are also some very contrived plot devices. Why would Annika give Megan a gift of a mobile phone out of the blue? (Answer: Because the film’s director, Lynn Shelton, knows she’ll need to ring her a few scenes later to ask her to impersonate her mother for that dicey parent-teacher meeting.)
The 15A cert is because of some sexual content and tasteless language, but the film has enough quality to make you forget this as it moves towards a climactic prom concert on a ship. All the loose ends are tied up a mite too tidily here, but I loved the last scene. One might have expected the schmaltz to be laid on with a trowel but it isn’t. The film ends with a suddenness that impresses.
If the rest of it had been this restrained, it would have been a more inspired chronicle of a character growing into her true self by a circuitous route, rather than a standard issue chick-flick with a nickel-and-dime psychology of a young woman deciding what she really wants out of life, especially when the audience is 10 steps ahead of the character in question in such a behavioural diagnosis.