Which Brings Me to You Review: This easy-on-the-eye, easy-on-the-mind rom-com works as long as it doesn’t try to go deep
The chemistry between the two leads makes up for the lack of any tension or emotion—until the movie tries to bring in tension and emotion
Which Brings Me to You belongs to a sub-genre of film within the rom-com, one where both the leads get to know each other through the course of a day. While Before Sunrise is the crown jewel of this kind of film (it is impossible to not think of it while watching this), there are, by now, millions of such films with the Rise of the OTTs. How much you might enjoy Which Brings Me to You depends completely on your liking for this very specific kind of film.
Lucy Hale and Nat Wolff play Jane and Will, two charming youngsters with inconsequential, rom-com-ish professions (he’s a photographer, she’s a journalist). When they first meet each other, they just casually talk, with no intention of meeting each other ever again (this is the kind of film that doesn’t want you to think much, so we have an explicit line that says this). But of course, we’ve seen rom-coms, and we know the basic beats. So, we sit and wait to see how this particular film will make itself stand out, given the very low bar it has to clear in order to become a good enough rom-com. And the spin in Which Brings Me to You is to show us alternating narrative flashbacks about Will and Jane’s past relationships. And to show us Will and Jane participating in these flashbacks, interacting with each other’s former selves.
In theory, this is a great idea, and this idea works for a while. Both Hale and Wolff are in good form, and even the supporting characters are cast well. I particularly loved Hale’s performance— initially, Lucy seems to want to come across as cool and casual, but as she begins to get to know Will, she softens. She keeps looking at him with the expression of having found someone interesting but being hesitant about it. There’s a sense of protective layer slowly coming undone—every time Will does something, Lucy exclaims it in words. He offers her pie and takes the offer back, and she exclaims, “Are you reneging on your pie offer?” He does an Irish Goodbye on someone, and she says, “The Irish Goodbye?” Before she wants to ask a question that will make her get to know him more, she pauses for a moment and says, “I have a question.” These little touches add more authenticity to Lucy than the 2945 flashbacks do.
Hale and Wolff have good chemistry—the absence of which can completely derail a film like this. And there isn't a single dull moment. Every other dialogue is a flirtatious line, a self-deprecating joke, or an amused discovery about the other person (and I don’t think this is the film trying to keep us interested, but rather Will and Jane trying to come across as funny to each other). Characters come and go for mere seconds, they add no weight to the ‘plot’, but they keep things interesting. There’s someone who wants to sleep with Will’s older girlfriend. There’s a druggie younger brother. There’s a couple who sort out their differences in the bed. Most of these touches exist only to bring a smile or light a bulb in the viewer’s head, and Which Brings Me to You would have ended up as a perfectly predictable, derivative feel-good watch if it had carried on this approach.
The music is derivative (Upbeat music plays for upbeat scenes. Poetic music plays for poetic scenes.) The cinematography is derivative (show the good-looking angles, make most of the scenes center-framed and neatly lit). Even the kinds of things the characters do are derivative. Walk. Eat a dessert. Sit on the beach. Walk more. Go to a bar. Drop someone at their place. Oh, and walk again.
The issue with the film begins when it tries to weave in so many themes into the flashbacks that none of Will and Jane’s past relationships make us feel anything. We get a socially anxious alcoholic, a nerdist lawyer, a relationship between a college kid and an older woman, commitment issues, cheating, mental health issues, a father-daughter angle—these topics are way too deep for this film, and it struggles with extracting meaningful insights out of these portions. With a longer running time, it would have been possible to flesh out these portions better (and the ones following them), but with a running time of less than a hundred minutes, we are only told what happened to these characters, we never understand how it made them feel. This makes most of the film feel like getting to know gossip-worthy information about two strangers who’ve both had a lot of history, rather than making us know these people.
As a result, when the ending comes, it feels almost pointless. Logic is one of the things that barely matters in a rom-com (here, within a same line of dialogue, the sun sets, and we go from light to dark). But when Will and Jane tell each other why they think they will make a good pair (as compared to the previous relationships), it is only told through two big lines of dialogue, but it doesn’t seem to make logical sense. It doesn’t feel like something these characters would do. After a major reveal about Will comes way late into the narrative, we are immediately rushed to the climax, with almost no time spent on how this makes Jane feel.
Which Brings Me to You sacrifices all potential for emotional heft, and this is not a wrong thing by itself—God knows people need mindless romances every now and then in their busy lives. But when the film tries to bring in depth and plummets past it without spending enough effort, it feels neither simple nor nuanced. It feels like eating half an orange and spitting out the rest.