No Strings Attached (2011)
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Written by Elizabeth Meriweather
Starring Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Cary Elwes, Kevin Kline
Release Date January 21st, 2011
Published January 20th, 2011
It's becoming a modern movie affliction; movies that are more ideas than movies. "The Dilemma" is a good example: How do you tell your best friend that his wife is cheating on him? Good idea but that was all anyone seemed to come up with and the film flailed about hoping the cast would find something funny to do. More often than not, the cast never found anything.
"No Strings Attached" is another example of this affliction. The idea is simple: Can two people have a sexual relationship without feelings getting in the way? And, much like "The Dilemma," no one really thought of anything more beyond that idea and thus stranded a charming cast, lead by Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, in a plotless mess where only occasionally does someone find something funny to say.
Adam and Emma met briefly in Summer Camp as teenagers when an awkwardly distant Emma attempted to comfort a sad Adam and he offered a clumsy teenage come on. They met again in College at a frat party when Emma asked Adam to a family function that turned out to be a funeral. You know how you invite strangers on dates to funerals, so funny. And they met again one year later at a random farmer's market where Adam got Emma's phone number right in front of his girlfriend, because our main character is a total jerk.
Much would seem to stand in the way of these two bad-timing having folks getting together but when Adam gets blitzed after his girlfriend leaves him for his TV star father (Kevin Kline, in a shocking cameo) he ends up naked on Emma's couch and eventually in her bed. Emma is now a medical resident working ungodly hours in order to become a doctor; she has little time for a relationship. What she does have time for however is hook ups and booty calls and lots of them. Yes, Adam is given what we are to believe is the dream relationship for all emotionally stunted men 'Sex Buddies.'
So why is Adam so miserable? It turns out, in what would be an interesting twist in a better and far more thoughtful and unique film, Adam is not the typical immature boy-man that he might seem. Too bad he has fallen for an emotionally walled off nut case that could only exist in the pages of an under-written romantic comedy.
The eminent critic Mick Lasalle of the San Francisco Chronicle made an interesting point about Ashton Kutcher and his movies. To paraphrase Lasalle: Ashton Kutcher's been in a number of bad movies but he's never been all that bad in those movies. Indeed, Kutcher is an appealing screen presence who delivers more than what is on the page to his characters. He just chooses some truly horrible movies.
"No Strings Attached" is a pretty horrible movie in which Ashton Kutcher is, as usual, not that bad in. Ashton gives the character charm and a soulful, puppy dog quality. The problem is that the rest of the film is such a shambles. Director Ivan Reitman and writers Elizabeth Meriwether and Michael Samonek seem to have an idea for a movie but fail to deliver characters whose motivations from scene to scene are consistent and instead they rely on hit and miss sitcom jokes that hang off of the film's premise.
Poor Natalie Portman is the biggest victim of the hit and miss style of "No Strings Attached." Portman's Emma is called upon to be an emotional disaster reeling from one motivation to the next at the whim of whatever comic notion struck director Ivan Reitman in the moment.
At one moment Reitman finds it funny for Emma to invite a strange man on a date to a family funeral. In the next she's giving her phone number to a guy in front of his girlfriend. In the next she seeks a purely sexual relationship. Then she gets drunk and jealous. Then she tells him to sleep with other women and then she's jealous again. Each time Emma is led to look like a fool because no one bothered to give her a back-story that might lend context to her oddball behavior.
Making matters worse in "No Strings Attached" is a sensational supporting cast that drowns in the wake of the creators’ lack of any clue what to do with them. Kevin Kline as Adam's father is a heedless hedonist whose love of drugs and sex is supposedly funny because he's old. That's the joke, he's old. I imagine that Reitman thought hiring Kevin Kline was all that he needed to make this character work and that's not an unreasonable notion, but even Kline's charm can't get around how misbegotten Reitman's direction of No Strings Attached is.
Lake Bell plays Adam's co-worker who clearly has a crush on him. Here, the film adds a strange sort of cruelty as nice guy Adam is asked to flirt with Bell's Lucy while pining for crazy Emma. If Lucy were a bigger nutcase than Emma or maybe just mean in some way then his behavior toward her might be excusable. Instead, Lucy and Adam have an uncomfortable and brief courtship before she is shuffled off into another character's jockey send off.
The brilliant Greta Gerwig from “Greenberg” is wasted in the role of Emma's best friend, sweetly paired off with Adam's best friend Eli (Jake M. Johnson) in one of the film's many thrown away plots. And The Office star Mindy Kaling is brought in to deliver a few tart one liners that sound as if she wrote them herself. Kaling's character exists only for one-liners and to her credit they are the funniest moments in the film.
There are parts as well for rapper Ludacris, Cary Elwes, and Juno's best pal Olivia Thirlby but nothing really of note. It seems at times that everyone in the cast was hired to inhabit a type and then jokes were written to play off of that type and then everything was cut together with fingers crossed that something coherent would emerge.
Sadly, nothing coherent does emerge from No Strings Attached aside from a continuing sense that Ashton Kutcher has talent and really poor taste in material. Like us, Kutcher saw the potential of the idea of No Strings Attached but like the rest of the cast he is left hanging by a creative team that failed to develop anything beyond a premise and a couple of good one liners.
One last note, some Oscar pundits have wondered aloud if No Strings Attached were bad enough to be Natalie Portman’s “Norbit,” i.e the film that some believe sunk Eddie Murphy’s chances of winning Best Supporting Actor for his excellent turn in “Dreamgirls.” The answer is a simple no: “No Strings Attached” is not as bad as “Norbit.” Indeed, few movies have ever been as bad as “Norbit.”
