Cinefile

Moviegoers are accustomed to treating the month of August with little more than a shrug. You see, August is caught in that cinematic purgatory between the summer box office fluff and the Oscar fare of the fall season.  This is why we have forgettable movies like The Expendables or the incredulous re-release of Avatar wedged into August. Nanette Burstein’s Going The Distance is the rare case of a late summer release that both entertains and doesn’t completely dumb down your sentiments. A real sleeper hit if there ever could be one this time of the year.

Drew Barrymore stars as Erin, a bright and quietly disillusioned intern at a New York newspaper company. Erin understands the current employment climate of her journalism field: it sucks. So, on a night out to tie one on with a co-worker, she comes across Garrett (Justin Long) while having an incident over the Centipede arcade game at the bar (note: Centipede is one of the many 80s and early 90s references the characters keep using as humor source material).  Suffice it to say, the two click and are soon in bed—though Burstein handles their sped up courtship with an authentic sweetness, largely helped by the fact that the pair were actually dating in real life. The rest of Going The Distance follows a not-so-great plot of Erin and Garrett trying to make their long distance relationship work (Erin flies back to California for grad school). What saves the film is the colorful cast. Barrymore is comfortably at ease here; when she speaks about the way she likes to receive oral sex, it’s equally as funny as it is surprising to hear such a Hollywood starlet speak so frankly. Long, an oft-overlooked guru at improvisation, really meshes well with his buddies Dan (It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Charlie Day) and Box (30 Rock’s Jason Sudeikis). Their conversation of who would be on their “Fuck It List” (a riff on Rob Reiner’s droopy The Bucket List) brings the sort of devilish smiles that have been missing in American comedies since the original American Pie. Plus, Jim Gaffigan has a line during an abrupt table sex scene that is so relaxed and brilliant in its brevity, I’ll leave it for you to cherish.

By now it’s clear that Going The Distance does ride the wave of raunchy verbal humor and it doesn’t try to be another Never Been Kissed (an impression that is crudely created by its misleading theatrical trailer). Director Burstein has made a career out of making documentaries (even being nominated for an Oscar at one point) and now she makes an unusually comfortable transition to a fiction studio picture. Perhaps all of those years of actually listening and watching the way humans interact put Burstein at the forefront of making the first bearable Hollywood rom-com in a long time.  An evening date scene with Erin and Garrett shot with natural light and only using handheld cams breathes with discovery. The screenplay by newcomer Geoff LaTulippe rises above its so-so plot by giving its story over to its screen characters.

If Pandora seems exhausting or if Stallone just seems too silly, go hang out with the characters from Going The Distance; you could all poke fun at Top Gun with close candor.