Movie Review: No Strings Attached

No Strings Attached (2011)

Directed By:
Ivan Reitman

Starring:
Natalie Portman: Emma
Ashton Kutcher: Adam
Greta Gerwig: Patrice
Kevin Klnie: Alvin
Lake Bell: Lucy

Rating:

You're Entering A World of Pain

No Strings Attached operates on the somewhat dated premise that two people can’t have sex without falling in love. In it, watered down Judd Apatow characters watch as watered down characters from romantic comedies made early last decade meet, meet again, meet one more time and, finally, get around to having sex. Then they get around to having an argument about the meaning of the sex. Then, mercifully, it’s over.

Two somewhat useless preludes to the film tell us everything we need to know about the main characters, Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Aston Kutcher). In the first, 10 years before the action of the movie, kid Adam and kid Emma meet at camp and get to talking to each other. Adam is the emotional type, you can tell, because he’s crying over his mom and dad’s divorce. Emma, as is made clearly evident, isn’t the emotional type. She tells him to buck up and that, no, he can’t get to third base. Ten years later, the two are in college. Emma, you can tell, is weird and smart because she goes to MIT and wore flannel pajamas to a frat house pajama party. Adam, you can tell, is kind of stupid because he doesn’t go to MIT and because he was going to have a good time that night, regardless of Emma’s random appearance.

Before you can say “doomed romance,” we flash forward a year, when Adam and his girlfriend are broken up, when Emma is a doctor-in-residency at a hospital in L.A., where Adam is a staffer on a high school musical T.V. show. Adam goes to his father’s house and finds out that dad (Kevin Kline) is sleeping with his ex. This is horrible, possibly psychologically damaging news, and Adam responds to this life crisis the way any rational male would: by getting drunk and dialing every woman in his contact list, looking to get laid. He wakes up in Emma’s apartment, where a bunch of med students and a gay dude giggle at him because he has nothing more than a towel to cover himself with. Hungover and unable to remember his night, Adam sleeps with Emma. The two enjoy it so much that they decide to sleep together a whole lot, pledging not to let their casual sex develop into a serious relationship. Hence the title.

Obviously, things don’t go as planned. Two people like Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman don’t walk into a romantic comedy without falling in love. I guess my only problem with the sex first, romance later attitude of the film is that we’re never really given a sense of Adam or Emma as people, so when they fall in love all we have to fall back on is that really long montage of them having sex every time they have the urge. I imagine the vows they eventually exchange have something to do with Adam’s ability to do everything right, do it in fifteen minutes, and do it in the back of a BMW 5 Series.

Actually, I guess I shouldn’t complain about the lack of character development in No Strings Attached, simply because most comedies don’t go overboard with character detail. Characters in these films are broad, designed so as to be laughed or awwwwed at, people who we’re supposed to be as smitten with as they are with each other. But No Strings Attached’s strokes are really broad, and the fact that Adam and Emma eventually get together permanently looks less like star-crossed destiny and more like guidebook scriptwriting. Adam is a nice guy with a nice career and good looks, but I guess we should look on his life with pity because his dad is screwing his hedonist ex. Emma has unexplained problems with emotion and seems driven to have lots of sex with Adam due to something that can really only be described as programming. The reason they break up is because Adam got attached, this despite the fact that they went on zero dates and had literally no conversations that didn’t revolve around rules to ensure that the two would only have sex. The reason they get back together is because Emma is magically emotional, presumably because she hasn’t had sex in two weeks. Understandable, considering that her and Adam had sex every fifteen minutes, with breaks for awkward dinners and work.

These aren’t real people, which tends to be a big problem in comedy. Real people, well, probably wouldn’t have fallen in love based on a relationship that was 100% sexual. After their disaster of a first date, they probably would have made note of their irreconcilable differences and, shock of shocks, moved on in life. Both might have been hung up on each other for awhile, but new people would have entered the picture, and new people are nice, too. Normal relationships exist at the fringes of this people: One of Emma’s friends starts dating one of Adam’s friends, and even though Adam’s friend is a typical dude and is all like “Yo, bro, you need to nail this broad like it ain’t no thang,” he seems absolutely happy with his decision to date and be in a normal human relationship with Emma’s friend. But maybe that’s just because Greta Gerwig is so nice, and we’d all be so lucky to date such nice people.

And that’s the other thing—it’s 2011, and I can probably describe 80% of the characters in an Ivan Reitman comedy as “nice” without slighting any of them. Greta Gerwig is nice, Mindy Kaling is nice, Lake Bell is nice, and while Ludacris talks a good game, he cries during the filming of a high school musical TV show. Even Kevin Kline’s character gets redemption, though it would have been preferable had his character only appeared once and gotten his joke out of the way. The only characters who are irredeemable are the ones who cheat on Adam or tell him that his 5 Series and lame job aren’t enough to score a woman like Emma for life, but Emma is neurotic and strange and also a doctor, which makes the guy’s line about big words and saving lives an odd one. Then again, Adam leaves a perfectly awesome girl because their first kiss didn’t go right. Maybe Adam and Emma deserve each other, after all.