Eternity
Love isn't just one happy moment, right? It's a million. And it's bickering in the car, and supporting someone when they need it, and it's growing together, and looking after each other.
It can't be denied that this movie isn't really, really funny. Some of the runners, such as the Korean War bit, or the pretzel bit, were just great laugh lines from a writing team — and I think the film's willingness and steadfastness not to engage in the minutia of the framing device and its acting mechanics was a very smart choice, because that's really not what the movie is interested in whatsoever.
In general, I think this movie wa sa success and I attribute that success to the script's unwillingness to take the easy way out. I appreciated that all three vertices in our little love triangle are fairly flawed in different ways:
- Elizabeth Olsen isn't given much to work with, but the text of her character has a little bit of scuminess, and she sells the pathos strongly enough.
- Miles Teller's character is, for sure, guilty of everything that his rival accuses him of - in the same way that we all have a little self-interest burrowed deep in our heart.
- And Callum Turner's character is clearly has some anger problems and a bit of subtextual one-dimensionality — the traits that you do ignore as a 25-year-old newlywed, but would grate on you after 65 years of marriage.
The movie fades in quality in the few instances where it stoops to melodrama - mostly in the middle act, which any viewer is going to know beat by beat, and therefore goes on entirely too long and with way too few laugh lines.
Given the audaciousness of the framing device, the movie did not quite take full advantage of its visual possibilities. The little sequence of Elizabeth Olsen gaping between eternities was legitimately cool, as long as you didn't think about it particularly hard — but the most beautiful and interesting parts of the film were in the junctions themselves, rather than the paradises. (Perhaps that is a deliberate metaphor.)
The movie that comes most readily to mind, having watched Eternity, is Palm Springs: also a high-concept rom-com that never takes itself too seriously and has legitimately hilarious moments And a bit of sloppiness. which, in a different world, probably could have been a massive box office success — if its goal was, at all, to land in the box office. This is a vehicle largely for Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen to be charming: and while they share almost zero chemistry, their individual charisma makes up for it, as does a great collection of complimentary performances from their surrounding cast. (The movie also owes a lot to The Good Place, of course, but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which is perhaps winkingly echoed in the title.)
This is not high art — nor is it pablum. I want more of these films!