ONE TRUE LOVES - Mark Reviews Movies

One True Loves, The Avenue

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 6, 2023

The screenplay for a parody version of One True Loves would likely be almost indistinguishable from the actual movie. This is a romantic melodrama so ridiculous in both its big details and its small ones that it's somewhat tempting to recommend the movie as an accidental comedy. The misguided sincerity of everyone involved, though, would probably make such an ironic recommendation crueler than an outright pan.

Unfortunately, the level of genuineness does make a good amount of this hilarious, nonetheless. We meet Emma (Phillipa Soo), who grew up in small-town Massachusetts to bookstore-owning parents and a know-it-all sister, and all she ever wanted was to leave such a life and see the world. As a teen at a house party, she has a best friend, a guy who clearly is in love with her, and a big crush on the school's popular Olympics-trained diver, although the screenplay by Taylor Jenkins Reid (who also wrote the novel upon which the movie is based) and Alex J. Reid (the author/screenwriter's husband) shifts his water-based discipline once it becomes vital to the plot.

One might be asking how something like that could become so important to the plot of an over-the-top romance. Would you believe that Jesse (Luke Bracey), our protagonist's long-time crush who eventually becomes her husband and suddenly becomes a champion long-distance swimmer instead of an Olympics-bound diver, becomes stranded on a desert island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for four years? This is somewhat jumping the gun in terms of the plot—but not, as unlikely as it might seem that such an outrageous and narratively antiquated development would come out of the blue before the first act even begins, as much as one might expect.

Sure enough, though, we get a montage of teenaged Emma and Jesse meeting-cute at the party, having a series of adventures around the world as travel reporters, getting married, and watching him head off on a solo expedition to Alaska, where the helicopter he's on somehow crashes in an environment suitable for a tropical island. The story jumps ahead those four years, and Emma has moved back to her hometown and is now happily engaged to Sam (Simu Liu), that best friend from high school. Before the couple's upcoming nuptials, though, Jesse has been found alive.

Don't ask how he survived. The screenplay and director Andy Fickman are very cautious about revealing too many details, including how long he had been missing—as if the filmmakers were trying to decide what would seem even slightly believable as they were making the movie—and especially how Jesse could be close enough to swim somewhere after four years of malnutrition but that was too far away when he was in much better health. Since any specific account would be too impossible to believe, this movie gives him a slightly shaggy beard when he reunites with his now-engaged-to-anther-man wife, assuming that's all we need.

The rest of the story should be pretty predictable. Emma has to decide between her old husband and the man who is/was about to become her new one.

Sam is a really, really good guy, which is apparent because the characters keep saying it. It's also obvious because, after spending a whole day with Jesse to reconnect and catch up with each other, Emma returns home to find her fiancé making her a vegan grilled cheese sandwich, just in case, Sam says, she decided to come home (Is the timing here perfectly coincidental, or has he been spending the entire evening grilling sandwich after sandwich until she walks through the door?). When Emma decides to spend some time on her own and with Jesse, poor Sam just gets to bemoan his situation to his high school music class (when, one has to presume, he isn't making sandwiches—just in case).

As for Jesse, well, he's Emma's first true love, so they spend a lot of time together, mainly talking about how perfect they were together and how terrible it is that fate tore them apart from one another. They're wholly bland characters and conversations, in other words, because the only important elements about them are those two things. The whole movie's philosophy is that it doesn't matter who these people are, because it only matters what has happened to them, what is happening to them, and what will happen when Emma finally decides: the guy and life she had or the guy and life she has.

Everyone's so dull that, for us, it's not much of a choice at all. By the time it truly starts taking this absurd situation far too seriously, One True Loves stops being even accidentally funny, which is something an accomplishment, considering how hilarious it can be.

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