Canadian-helmed flick a not-so rom-com

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This article was published 10/02/2018 (3146 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Thomas Middleditch probably isn’t the first person who comes to mind when you think the words “romantic lead.”

The Silicon Valley actor (he’s also in those Verizon ads) has untamable frizzy curls and the kind of chin for which a beard is not merely a hipster affectation.

His offbeat looks have more often seen him cast in comedic roles — and his starring turn in the Canadian romantic drama Entanglement isn’t exactly putting him in Ryan Gosling territory.

As Ben Layten, he plays a clinically depressed guy whose wife has left him.

After his suicide attempt is foiled (two times over), he devises a plan to figure out where his life went wrong, figuring if he finds the crucial fork in the road, he can return there to correct his path.

With the help of his neat-freak neighbour Tabby (the lovely, underused Diana Bang), he tries to track down the woman his parents almost adopted before he was born, to see if having a sister might have been the key to a happier life.

That woman turns out to be Hanna (Jess Weixler of The Good Wife, doing her winning best with a cliché), who is, of course, the opposite side of his staid, cautious coin and for whom Ben develops non-brotherly feelings.

She’s sassy, she shoplifts, she talks about quantum physics — your classic manic pixie dream girl.

Can this bare-midriffed free spirit help buttoned-down Ben beat his blues?

Entanglement is well-acted, handsomely shot and features an excellent soundtrack of ’60s R&B. But almost everything about it feels phoney and telegraphed — not to mention the big reveal that anyone who’s watched a movie in the past 30 years will see coming almost immediately (and for those who don’t, there are some clumsy pointers along the way).

Director Jason James and screenwriter Jason Filiatrault are going for some Big Question stuff on how we’re all connected, but Entanglement never makes those connections organically itself.

There are moments of what’s intended to be over-the-top whimsy — to its credit, the film is fully self-aware of the trope it’s perpetrating — but they don’t go far enough. If Hanna is truly Ben’s dream girl, we need more than a montage of hide-and-seek games and cartoon deer to believe in the spell she’s casting.

It’s also not a rom-com by any stretch, though it’s being described as such. It has quirk for days and oodles of charm, but it desperately needs laughs, especially with a lead character who’s so glum.

And that’s a big problem. Ben suffers from depression and has been on medication much of his life (in one of the only funny scenes, he argues with a little girl who’s a fellow patient of the child psychologist he’s still seeing). It’s tough to be on board with a film that suggests merely finding out he’s not alone could be enough to turn him around.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @dedaumier