Keira Knightley stars as Megan, a twenty-eight-year-old woman who is kind of stuck in a rut. She has a graduate degree but spends her days spinning a sign out front of her dad's accounting office. She's also still dating her high school boyfriend and hanging out with her high school friends, which wouldn't necessarily be bad things in and of themselves. However, she's just sort of, as she herself eventually says, "floating"-- hanging out with the same people and doing the same things because that's what she's always done. At one point she tells a story about how she and her boyfriend got together; everyone kept telling her that he liked her, and eventually he asked her out in front of everyone, so she said yes, not necessarily because she herself had developed a crush on him and decided that he was who she really wanted to be with, but because that's what everyone was telling her to do, and it was easy. She realizes that this has become a pattern: just sort of going along with the things everyone else tells her to do rather than actively making her own decisions.
Her boyfriend (Anthony, played by Mark Webber) proposes to her at her friend Allison's (Ellie Kemper's) wedding. Allison interrupts the proposal to ask Megan to go find Allison's mom. Megan catches her dad (Jeff Garlin) making out with someone (possibly Allison's mom, but definitely not hers). She freaks out and leaves the reception without saying goodbye to anyone. She winds up at a grocery store, where some teenagers ask her to buy them beer. She agrees, and winds up having a great time hanging out with them for a few hours. When she gets home, her boyfriend is worried and upset that she disappeared from the reception; she makes up an excuse, and they start talking about his proposal. She actually does want to marry him and is ready to run off to Vegas right away, but he reminds her that they have to go to Allison and her husband's wedding brunch the next day. She tells him that the day after that, she is going to a weeklong seminar to help her find herself or some such. Instead, she just sort of starts driving aimlessly, until one of the teens from the other night, Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz) calls and asks for her help with something. Megan winds up spending the week with Annika and her single father, Craig (Sam Rockwell), telling them that the lease is up on her apartment and she can't move into her new one for a few days.
The movie is interesting in that, because you can pretty much tell where it's going to go even just from the preview (Megan is going to find what she's looking for with Craig and Annika and help them out with their problems, too), you wind up just focusing on and getting to know the characters, most of whom are interesting, and deciding how you feel about Megan's situation. Example: Megan is, as previously noted, stuck in a rut as far as her career and romantic relationship goes, and you can kind of see why her mom and friends are exasperated with her. However...not one person in her life is actually helpful. Her friends and her mom just want her to move on, get a real job, and marry Anthony because that's what she's "supposed" to do. Allison catches Megan getting coffee with Annika when she's supposed to be out of town at the seminar, and instead of asking if she's okay or why she would just disappear, she gives her a lecture, basically saying that if she doesn't marry Anthony, she's going to get left behind by the rest of them. For Megan, the appeal of Craig and Annika is that they like her without really knowing anything about her; they're not pressuring her to do any one certain thing, yet she does seem to grow as a person around them, taking Annika to see her mother, who she is estranged from, and taking the rap for Annika's friend Patrick (Dylan Arnold) when he gets in an accident. You get to see that she's a good person even if she doesn't exactly have everything figured out yet. "You've got to let go of this imaginary future you have in your head and just go with your gut," she tells Annika at one point. That's sort of the thesis of the movie; Megan hasn't moved forward with her life because she doesn't know what she wants, and with Craig and Annika, it's not like she suddenly finds the answers, but things feel right with them in a way that they just don't in her regular life.
I generally enjoyed the movie; I liked Megan, Craig, and Annika, and I thought that all of the actors gave pretty solid performances. That said, there were a couple of things that bugged me about the story. One of my least favorite movie tropes is, "Someone has a secret, and everyone's eventually going to find out, and they're going to be really mad for like five minutes, and then everything will be cool." When Megan explains to Craig how she met Annika and why she wants to stay with them, there is not much of a reason for her to withhold the information that she is engaged and needs some space...but she does, and she makes out with and (presumably) has sex with Craig without telling him, and then Annika finds out by accident, and Megan has to tell Craig, and...yeah. I
guess she doesn't tell them about the engagement initially because she doesn't really feel that great about the whole thing, and I
guess she just got swept up in things with Craig and decided to go for it, but the lies just make things so much more uncomfortable than necessary, and add an additional, unnecessary level of drama. It would be challenging enough for her to try to figure out what she wants and deal with her feelings for Craig without also having to deal with the consequences of lying about the whole thing, and given how nice and understanding that Craig and Annika are, it seems cruel of her to mess with them like that.
Also...she initially does what she says she was going to do, which is leave Craig and Annika at the end of the week and go off to marry her fiancé in Vegas. The thing that makes her change her mind is that, though they had said they were going to go off and get married without telling their friends and families, Anthony takes a selfie of them at the airport and immediately sends it to their friends, wanting them to be involved. This makes Megan feel like he's doing the whole wedding thing for the sake of the group, not for them, and tells him that she's "dropping out of the group." I mean, sure, don't marry him if you're doing it for the wrong reasons and also have feelings for someone else, and sure, distance yourself from your friends if you feel like they're not good for you anymore...but how about explaining what you're doing and what you want? It seems like her pattern has been to go along with whatever everyone else wants, never saying or even really thinking about what
she wants, then running away when she realizes she wants something else; isn't "dropping out of the group" sort of the same thing? Why can't she try to explain herself to Allison and the others? I also have my misgivings about her jumping right into a relationship with Craig; presumably, her relationship with Anthony hasn't been good for a long time, but she's been with him for twelve years. She must at least care about him, right? I think the point is that she didn't know what she wanted until she found it, and now that she's found it she's just going to go for it without a care about what anyone else thinks, which is great, but I think just abandoning her whole life seems a little drastic, as well.
So, bottom line: enjoyable movie, good performances. Misgivings about the story.
