What If Review

People love to talk about romantic comedy as a dead genre, a wasteland of cliches where the best are far behind.  Once we made it through the nineties, with our fair share of enjoyable fare from the likes of Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore, the chick flick landscape looked bleak indeed.  There are few genres in which it's so easy to be lazy: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.  It's a three-step process that, if done with attractive enough leads and enough gooey sentimentality, will make money for all involved.  There's little risk involved, if no one is feeling risky.

But over the past five years or so, romantic-comedy has entered a new stage of life, one that might be deemed neo-radical, hearkening back to Woody Allen's seminal Annie Hall, which - while romantic and comedic - went darker, not giving viewers an easy happy ending, but rather, using all of its gimmicks and fantastical turns to paint a more realistic picture of what it means to be a person in love, and thus, what it means to be a person, period.  The self-awareness, the meta-commentary on the genre, and on romance at large, made Annie Hall the freshest rom-com since the genre's pioneering film, It Happened One Night.

Now, each year, we get one or two rom-coms that comment on the genre, but tend to fit a little more neatly into modern audiences' understanding of romantic-comedies.  (500) Days of Summer, which is more or less a remake of Annie Hall, brought all the quiet pathos and winking scenes of Allen's classic, but with a more optimistic ending (the same can be said of the brutal Eternal Sunshine, should one want to squeeze it into a single generic category).  Crazy, Stupid, Love and Friends With Benefits are standouts because they satisfy our desire to see things work out happily, but they acknowledge the artifice and eventually surrender, at least somewhat.

It's perhaps fitting, then, that Michael Dowse's What If feels like such a breath of fresh air, even when considered alongside its contemporaries.  Instead of going the radical approach, it instead revisits and reworks the tropes of the Pretty Woman mode of neoclassical romantic-comedy.  Specifically, What If is When Harry Met Sally for a new generation, pondering whether men and women can just be friends, served up with a healthy dose of nostalgia for the cinematic romance that has come before (The Princess Bride serves that purpose here, though The Thing tellingly pops up, too).

Because typical romantic comedies have fallen by the wayside in lieu of hipper, smarter pictures, What If almost feels like a homecoming.  It shrugs away the old structure - the boy, Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe) doesn't start the movie by getting the girl, Chantry (Zoe Kazan) - but still embodies a recognizable form, but dresses that form up with all the hipness and smarts that are usually absent from these more straightforward rom-com conceits.  The dialogue is brilliantly funny, veering into very weird territory (such as the amount of feces left inside a corpse) with utter confidence.  Elan Mastai's script is the genre's best since (500) Days of Summer.

One of the reasons What If works so well is that it avoids the grand romantic gestures that often serve as the climax in these types of movies.  When Wallace steps outside those carefully curated lines, and does something a bit bigger, he suffers for it and finds himself begrudgingly still in the friend zone.  Dowse handily does the difficult task of keeping viewers teetering on a line alongside Wallace: he wants to date Chantry, and we want him to date Chantry, but they're wonderful as friends, and we want him to respect those boundaries, as Chantry is already in a relationship.  There's a sense of dread, even horror (thus, The Thing), as Wallace tries to figure out what to do, and the options laid out for him by best friend Allan (Adam Driver, who comedically towers over the tiny Radcliffe) lack a completely satisfactory choice.

What If speaks to the complications of modern dating.  Chantry and her boyfriend, Ben (Rafe Spall), try to navigate the tricky communicative acrobatics of living in different time zones.  Allan picks up a girlfriend of his own, the free spirited Nicole (Mackenzie Davis), despite her "taken" relationship status.  Wallace rebuffs the advances of Chantry's on-the-rebound sister Dalia (Megan Park) on the off chance that someday, Chantry will be single, and available, and interested in him.  It's a tangled web, and though most of the interactions happen in person (a pleasant surprise), there's a hint of the way technology makes things even tougher, with missed phone calls and tonally miscalculated e-mails potentially increasing the mess of love, lust, and friendship.

Radcliffe's Wallace is fittingly bumbling, adorable in his moroseness as the film begins, having (not even really that) recently gotten out of a relationship with a fellow medical student before dropping out of school.  Kazan looks and sounds like a Zooey Deschannel doppleganger, but she plays Chantry with more warmth than Deschannel's Summer, and more vulnerability.  Their rapport is instant, charming, and infectious; thus, the wonderful discomfort viewers will feel wondering whether they should root for love or for friendship.  The film begs the question whether that electric connection would be wasted on mere friendship.  Does such chemistry require a romantic connection to be fully realized, or worth it?

Of course, being a romantic-comedy, it's not surprised that the answer to that question might be a little muddled, or at least simplified for the benefit of starry-eyed viewers.  That doesn't make the questions any less interesting, or the film any less lovely.