D: Megan Griffiths / 97m

Cast: Toni Collette, Thomas Haden Church, Oliver Platt, Ryan Eggold, Nina Arianda, Ahna O’Reilly

Ellie Klug (Collette) is a music journalist working for Stax magazine.  Ten years before, her then boyfriend – and well-loved musician – Matthew Smith disappeared; his car was found abandoned and it was assumed he’d committed suicide, though his body was never found.  Ellie has never really recovered from Matthew’s disappearance, and has yet to put it behind her.  Her boss, Giles (Platt), challenges her to write a story about Matthew and how much his music means ten years on.  Ellie is hesitant but grudgingly accepts the assignment, though she’s unsure of just what she’s going to write.  Her friend, Dana (Arianda), asks the all-important question: doesn’t Ellie want to know, once and for all, what happened?

Ellie is still unsure.  While she works out the best way to approach the assignment she meets aspiring musician Lucas (Eggold).  They begin a tentative relationship, but Ellie isn’t sure about about committing to this either.  At a bar she bumps into Charlie (Church), an ex-boyfriend who decides it would be a great idea if he made a documentary about Ellie’s search for Matthew (as he’s just completed a documentary filmmaking course).  They embark on a road trip, visiting places that were important in the early days of Ellie and Matthew’s relationship, including his home.  They also have a lead on Matthew’s whereabouts, footage of a singer in a club who may or may not be the missing musician.  Although the man who says he shot the footage turns out to be a fraud, Ellie comes to believe the footage really is of Matthew.  Meanwhile her relationship with Lucas becomes more serious, and when Charlie announces his engagement to Charlotte (O’Reilly), Ellie and Lucas are happy to go as a couple.

With the story on hold, Ellie attends Charlie’s wedding by herself, Lucas having gone to L.A. for talks with a record company (though he promises he’ll be back in time).  When Lucas fails to turn up, Ellie winds up in bed with one of the other guests.  Lucas discovers them together; to make matters worse she insults Charlie as well.  Ellie hides away in her apartment, ignoring her calls and fixating on the supposed footage of Matthew.  It’s only when Dana shows up to jolt her out of her misery that Ellie realises she may know a way of finding Matthew after all.  She apologises to Charlie and they resume their road trip…

Lucky Them has several themes woven through its meandering script, though none of them are particularly original.  There’s lost love, perceived betrayal, irreconciled emotions, and they all lead to Ellie’s unwitting withdrawal from Life.  She’s a close approximation of the person she was ten years before, surrounded by reminders of the time she spent with Matthew, and tortured by not knowing why he disappeared (and if she’d only admit it, still in love with him).  Ellie hasn’t moved on from that time, hasn’t found a way to let go of the past.  She takes part in Life at a superficial level and derives no real enjoyment from it; she lacks passion, though it’s instructive that she becomes more expressive when talking about Matthew’s disappearance to a woman in a bar, almost defending him.  She’s also easily led, allowing Giles to dictate the nature of the assignment to her, allowing Lucas to pursue her and almost force their relationship into being, letting Charlie decide about the documentary and cajoling her to reveal more and more about herself during the filming.  Without the people around her, Ellie would be living her life completely in the past.

As Ellie, Collette has a tough time making the character sympathetic.  She’s a walking bundle of apathy and negativity, and while the reasons for her being so are clearly outlined, it doesn’t help draw the viewer in; there’s no point at which you’re hoping that she’ll turn everything around (though obviously she will).  With Ellie being so emotionally constipated, Collette doesn’t quite manage to make her a more interesting character, and settles for a kind of low-key cynicism in order to provide Ellie with a defining trait.  Charlie refers to relationships being unable to last if they can be summed up in a single sentence (e.g. “I was the exotic aesthete to her mid-Western homebody”).  For Ellie, the extrapolation would be, “A woman who refuses to see the good life going on around her”.  With this obstacle established from the beginning, Lucky Them struggles to give the viewer anyone to root for.

That said, it’s a relief that screenwriters Huck Botko and Emily Wachtel have come up with the character of Charlie, a socially awkward, dry-humoured man who doesn’t always appreciate the finer points of social interaction or etiquette.  In Church’s more-than-capable hands, Charlie is the movie’s saving grace, a direct, emotionally distant demi-pedagogue who’s funny throughout and the kind of true friend that Ellie really doesn’t deserve.  Church adopts an almost stentorian way of speaking that makes Charlie sound pompous at first until you realise just how awkward his manner is.  He’s also a bit of a bully, but in a caring, let’s-have-none-of-that-nonsense kind of way.  As the movie progresses, Ellie warms to him, and they bring each other out of their respective shells.  It’s these moments that have the greatest resonance in the movie, and as played by Collette and Church are also the most emotionally rewarding.

With Ellie proving such a poorly drawn character, and with her troubles being entirely self-inflicted, Lucky Them often goes off at a tangent in its efforts to hold its audience’s attention, and the search for Matthew often takes a back seat while Ellie continues to behave selfishly.  The answer to the question, is Matthew alive after all, is resolved in a satisfying manner, but without all the digressions could have been arrived at a lot sooner.  The subplot involving Lucas is both predictable and dull, while Giles is the kind of patrician mentor figure who seems out of place in today’s publishing world.  It’s not surprising then that the movie is directed in unspectacular fashion by Griffiths, and there’s little in the way of visual styling or flair, while the soundtrack is populated by a succession of indie tracks that only occasionally enhance what’s happening on screen (though fans of Rachael Yamagata will enjoy the end credits song she provides).

Rating: 5/10 – a disappointing exploration of how someone copes when the person they love most disappears suddenly without explanation, Lucky Them flounders for most of its running time and rarely convinces; saved (rescued even) by Church’s note-perfect performance, and best approached as a curious mix of emotional apathy and (very) low-key romanticism.