In HBO’s hit television series “Girls”, when Lena Dunham
writes about self-absorbed twenty-somethings who live in New York, but who
spend most of their time complaining about the nuisance of acting in common
consideration for others, it’s funny and full of interesting contradictions. When “That Awkward Moment”—the
debut feature from writer/director Tom Gormican—explores similar themes and
characters, but with no trace of self-reflective irony and with an insidious,
people-pleasing sense of lazy satisfaction, it only registers as sophomoric and
gratingly cynical.
Unlike
Dunham’s “Girls”, crucially “That Awkward Moment” is a celebration of the
post-college manosphere, and as the beer-soaked-Ping-Pong-ball adage suggests, Gormican
puts the bros in distractingly misogynistic priority before the aforementioned
hoes.
The
story centers around three young males who bond over their recent singleness.
After Mikey (Michael B. Jordon) finds out that his wife (Jessica Lucas) is
cheating on him with a lawyer, his friends Daniel (Miles Teller) and Jason (Zac
Efron) decide to support him by staying single and happy along his side. This
nonsensical and unwarranted pact begins to complicate when Jason falls in love
with a girl that he meets in a bar named Ellie (Imogen Poots) that he first
mistakes as a hooker because she dares to wear tall boots and keeps her
prophylactics in stock, and with whom he eventually begins to work with
professionally. Daniel also falls for
his friend with benefits named Chelsea (Mackenzie Davis) and begins dating her
on the sly, all while Mikey is secretly still carrying on a physical
relationship with his emotionally estranged wife.
The
premise of this tale, I guess, is that these man-children are too proud to
admit that they have found compatibility with someone of the opposite gender
and they somehow feel the need to keep their relationships a secret, lest they
be accused of betraying their brotherhood. What results in this manufactured
plot tension is a series of inexplicable contrivances where characters lie to
cover-up what shouldn’t even be a problem for normal thinking, rational adults
over the age of 15.
The
other result of this set-up is an overwhelming wave of forced machismo and
sexism that makes these protagonists impossible to like, even though the plot,
as it is shoddily constructed, is designed in such way for these men to realize
their behaviors are misguided. However, with this conceit in consideration, the
movie forces the women to settle into passive roles, in which we are supposed
to accept when they do inane things like date men who call them hookers the
second time they ever meet, or when they show forgiveness when they have been
lied about and hidden like a dirty affair, and when they let their boyfriends
meet their parents with large prosthetics hanging out of their zippers—a scene
that isn’t entirely played for laughs.
Besides
the outdated gender politics that hobbles this movie, what makes “That Awkward
Moment” all the worse is that it is painfully unfunny and poorly paced. Many
scenes begin as a visual gag or a conversation piece, but then devolve into wispy
montages when Gormican can’t figure out how to cut the scene into a natural transition. As evidenced by the blooper reel played during
the credits, a lot of the dialogue between these actors is improvised or
reworked on set, and as a consequence of bad scripting and direction the comedic
tune of each character is pitched too similarly when left to the actors to devices. Michael B. Jordon tries his best to keep his thankless
nice-guy role understated and Efron and Teller know how to command a scene, but
this sinking boat of a film only allows these talented actors to drown in its
misconceived mediocrity.
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014
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