WHAT HAPPENS LATER - Mark Reviews Movies

What Happens Later, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2023

Very little feels authentic about What Happens Later. Some of that is by design, because the story, about two former lovers reuniting after about 25 years at an anonymous regional airport on Leap Day, is built upon chance and coincidence.

That's fine, especially since the movie is clearly an inversion or a reconfiguration of a typical romantic comedy, in which two strangers who are destined to be together meet by chance and go through all of the rest of that formula. Here, two people who once knew each other intimately meet by a twist of fate as relative strangers, hash out what went wrong in their romance, and evade the fact there might still be something of a spark between them.

How much of that subversion is intentional, and how much of the idea of it is influenced by the presence of rom-com royalty Meg Ryan as the movie's co-star, co-screenwriter, and director? If anyone would know how to make a decent genre exercise or re-tool the formula to say something about it, Ryan seems an ideal candidate, because her career has seen her star in a bunch of romantic comedies of various levels of quality. In theory, she would know what works and doesn't, how these movies function or don't, and why their appeal remains strong no matter how many fads or trends come and go in movies.

The potentially clever idea here, though, is that this story exists as a sort of post-mortem of the kind of romance we might see in such a movie. We can imagine how Ryan's Willa Davis might have met her former flame Bill Davis (David Duchovny) a few decades ago as college students with a passion for music, a mutual attraction, and—most importantly of all, perhaps, for a gimmicky love story—the fact that they're both named "W. Davis." Did some kind of misunderstanding lead to them meeting for the first time, or did they secretly think that coincidence must have meant something akin to fate when they both realized the shared initial and surname?

It's sort of fun to speculate how all of that happened, just as it's an interesting thought exercise to wonder what will happen to the couple in a romantic comedy after the credits start rolling. That's basically what Ryan, Kirk Lynn, and Steven Dietz's screenplay (based on the last one's play Shooting Star) is doing in a very roundabout way. The main problem, then, is how much this story keeps going in circles around what really matters.

Some of that, again, is by design. The biggest element of that is the scenario itself, which sees Willa and Bill stuck on an unscheduled layover because of an incoming winter storm. Each of them spots the other early into their extended stay, and both of them attempt to avoid each other, too.

After Willa ends up in front of Bill in an awkwardly staged moment, the rest of the story has them talking at length about their lives now, their happy times together, and the reason their relationship ended. There's also some forced talk about the state of the modern world and how old they've started to feel by not understanding how things have changed.

The idea is sound, and both Ryan and Duchovny possess the sort of easy charm that could serve a two-hander like this one. Ryan plays the quirky brand of character she has played many times before, although now with some hip problems, while Duchovny plays a bored and cynical man who probably can't recall when stopped having dreams for his future. It's obvious they're enjoying themselves, so that's something.

Those simple notions of fun fade quickly, though, as the movie takes its limbo-like setting too much to heart. Watching these two characters trapped in such a contrived and uncomfortable scenario becomes the movie's own trap. It simply doesn't know what to do with these characters, except to avoid the obvious conversations, only to keep going over them once the subjects have been breached.

The setting is a major distraction, too, especially since the filmmakers turn it into an almost surreal place, where electronic signs offer advice, every stuck passenger except for the main characters seems to find a way out of the airport by a certain point, and the announcer (voice of Hal Liggett) over the public address system seems able to hear and respond to Willa and Bill whenever they need something or have a question to be answered. There's no supernatural secret to this place, by the way.

It all stops being mildly cute and charming in a short amount of time. What Happens Later makes us feel stuck in this story that doesn't have much to say or do and takes a long time to get there.

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