One Day review

Does Lone Scherfig's One Day adaptation live up to expectations? Take a look at our spoiler-free review

It was always going to be difficult to make Lone Scherfig’s One Day adaptation work, so news that it doesn’t shouldn’t come as much surprise. The director’s second film based on a hit book, after 2009’s An Education, One Day is a love story told in snapshots which never achieves more than shallow snapshot emotions.

Borrowing its structural bones (and much of everything else) from David Nicholls’ bestseller, One Day drops into the lives of Emma and Dexter, its two romantic leads, over twenty or so years of St Swithin’s Days. It’s this episodic structure, so engaging in book form, which causes Scherfig’s film to stumble.

Emma and Dexter's lives run in parallel, but at slightly different speeds. His star rises whilst hers orbits a service job in a tacky Mexican restaurant, hers overtakes years later when he loses himself to hedonism and a failed relationship. Each St Swithin's day shows the pair circling one another in a series of flirtations, fights, near misses and at times, full-on in flagrante.

On the page, the gaps in time are filled cleverly, tantalisingly even. Letters weave first person narration around dialogue and the reader turns detective, tracking down the connections between years and translating between what the characters say and really mean. It’s compellingly sparse storytelling, funny, captivating and enticing, but never frustrating.

On screen though, frustrating is about the measure of it. Instead of building a relationship with the characters, the high-speed tour of their friendship feels at worst like watching the trailer, rather than the film.

If I were to compare One Day to a back-to-back viewing of every single BT Family ad - those ninety second glimpses of narrative starring the lanky one out of My Family - it would be uncharitable, but not entirely inaccurate. The film’s text message-deep instalments allow us to form the same level of emotional attachment to its characters as you might feel towards the Gold Blend couple.

It’s a folly of venture rather than execution though. The cast is well chosen, especially Rafe Spall who ironically makes hapless Ian, failed stand-up comedian, the funniest character in the film. Played with the comic pathos of the Steve Coogan persona Coogan never wrote, Spall’s is the only character who becomes more likeable on screen than in the book. Without his great comic turn, One Day would feel like even less than the sum of its parts.

The screenplay, adapted by Nicholls himself, is full of wonderful lines too, most lifted from his already very funny novel. But trying to peel that complex structure from the page and stick it messily up on screen was a fool’s errand. The film ends up as a thin facsimile of Nicholls’ book, even verging on the parodic at times.

When Anne Hathaway and her Hollywood good looks were announced to be taking on the role of acerbic Yorkshire lass, Emma Morley, who starts out the novel with an ordinary face and a few pounds over svelte, there was a quiet uproar from fans of the book.

To reassure those people, Hathaway isn’t the problem here. She delivers the lines that need it with comic timing (even if it is in an accent which veers from a broad “ah’d loov ta coom” Yorkshire to polished RP from scene to scene), and even manages to look dumpy and flustered for ten minutes between 1989 and 1991.

Hathaway’s transformation from normal girl with a wicked tongue to gamine sexpot happens rather quickly, but then so does everything else. It’s the wind-rushing speed of the thing that stops you from sinking comfortably into the story.

The 80s-90s period stuff is done well though. Hathaway stomps around convincingly in a flowery dress and Doc Martens, while Jim Sturgess as Dexter saunters about in granddad shirts and waistcoats like a lost member of Crowded House. With Tracy Chapman on the turntable and Milan Kundera on the bookshelf, the late-eighties student setting is expertly drawn.

Dexter’s cringe-worthy career as a late-night TV presenter with a faux cockney accent and a habit of asking drunken audiences to “make some noise”, is just as well observed and gently fun. The film's observation of nineties trends: big weddings, stripped pine and crayfish, is also pleasant-enough satire. You'll certainly find things to like in the film, just nothing you won’t also find in the book.

Jim Sturgess arguably has the most difficult job, playing a mostly unlikeable character for the best part of the film, and then having to ask the audience for sympathy in the last act. Self-involved, cocky and worse of all, a bit famous, Dexter struggles with becoming an adult, learning his lessons about being a friend, a husband and a son too late every time.

Once again, the film's overly-ambitious timespan is at fault. Instead of getting to know Dexter slowly, with the passage of time teaching us to tolerate and accept his foibles (as we all do with real-life friends and family), the film’s audience is taken on a whistle-stop tour of dickish behaviour from Dex, leaving them asking why clever Emma didn’t kick him to the curb years back.

Once Dexter eventually learns that an orgy won’t keep him warm at night, Sturgess does his best to make the character likeable once more, but again, it's a case of too little, too late.

One bothersome aspect is how didactic One Day’s storytelling is, yet perhaps we should concede that it needs to be or the audience would be lost. Characters are forced to deliver lines such as “You’re going to make a wonderful teacher” because there’s no time to get the necessary information across more naturally.

The score too, preaches rather than informs, whimsical and comic one moment, then ominous and melodramatic when things take a sudden turn for the moribund. The effect on the audience is rather like being arm-twisted into an emotional response.

Film watchers are used to being manipulated, but there's a sense of being frog-marched to emotions here, rather than being allowed to arrive at them independently.

Laughs are more easily found. A brief karaoke scene and most of the exchanges between Ian and Emma see to that. At one key dramatic moment though, it struck me that I’d ported all my emotion and attachment wholesale from the characters in the book, not those on screen. My companion at the screening - who'd not read the novel - was left unmoved.

As a book, One Day is utterly charming. As a film, I’m afraid it has only slightly more charm than a PowerPoint presentation. Chugging through emotions in shorthand, we’re given one day of flirtation, one of frustration, one of being hopelessly, happily in love, one of grief. But on screen, One Day just isn’t enough. Not nearly so.