WHICH BRINGS ME TO YOU - Mark Reviews Movies

Which Brings Me to You, Decal

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 18, 2024

Some of us wonder if the couple from a romantic comedy will actually make it after the happy ending. Is the story we saw, usually entailing some meet-cute and a lot of external complications, enough to convince us of a healthy relationship, or is the real drama about to begin when the credits start to roll? Which Brings Me to You feels as if it has been made by people who ask similar questions about the genre, if only because it revolves around characters who seem pretty certain that nothing will come of their day-long adventure of getting to know each other.

The story of Keith Bunnin's screenplay comes from a novel by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott, and from the start, it appears as if it will be nothing different. Jane (Lucy Hale) is at a wedding for an old friend, and as the happy couple leaves the church, she notices Will (Nat Wolff) just showing up for the festivities. The two briefly chat and flirt a bit with a thick layer of defensive sarcasm, and with a little liquid courage, Jane just comes right out with it. She wants to have sex with Will in the coat closet.

If this turned out to be the setup for a typical romantic comedy, we'd probably have a lot of questions about how a relationship between those two characters would actually work, if it even could after such a brief meeting and such a casual, throwaway encounter. This film's smart enough to get ahead of us on that level, though. The two retreat to the closet, start getting hot and heavy, and are just on the edge of fulfilling Jane's spur-of-the-moment idea.

Then, Will gets cold feet or a crisis of conscience or something in his head that makes him stop from going further. He suggests that maybe the two of them could just talk for a bit, instead, and frustrated and a bit embarrassed by this stranger's rejection, Jane storms out of the reception, leaving an apologetic Will to offer her a ride to some place where the two can get some food before she heads out of town. Jane accepts. It's not as if either of them has any other plans, after all.

The rest of the film amounts to an extended conversation between Jane and Will, as they sit around in various spaces, drive around to different and random places, and continue to talk while sitting, standing, or walking around wherever they end up on the next step of their little escapade. All of the talk revolves around the various—and, given that they're both single and clearly not people ready for any kind of commitment right now, often disastrous—romances from their respective pasts.

Neither of them has any expectations for what will happen next or what might result from baring so many personal details to a relative stranger. After all, Jane is still annoyed and mildly offended that this guy didn't want to have sex with her, and Will didn't go through it for some reason that's good enough in his mind. Yes, something keeps poking through the corners of this story to get us to think that all of this opening up and confessing is going to bring these two characters to one of those inevitable conclusions of pretty much any romantic comedy, but if that is the case, that's for later.

Honestly, the screenplay does the work to make us understand who these characters are, even if it is primarily through stories of terrible and/or unfortunate past relationships, and why even the potential of a romance between them would fraught with each one's old, unresolved issues, as well as some new ones because they would be together. The film isn't skeptical or cynical about love or the trappings of this genre because of this. It's simply pragmatic and feels a bit more realistic than might be anticipated, despite the inherent contrivance of the whole premise.

Those stories do point to some vital details about these characters, too. There's Will's first love from high school, who promised to wait for him while he's at college—only for her to surprise him with something when he tried to make an unscheduled trip home to surprise her. In his latter years at college, Will ended up meeting Eve (Geneiveve Angelson), a woman a decade or so his senior, who actually cared about him, but something flipped in his head when things became more serious. That would start a pattern of loving and leaving that has caught up to him in a few ways.

As for Jill, she has a thing for difficult or troubled men (Surely, Will seems to fit that bill). The past ones include her first boyfriend Michael (Chase Liefeld), who refused to talk about his emotions, and Elton (Alexander Hodge), an apparent bad-boy type who had something else entirely going on in his life. Even the structure of these tales tells us something about these characters, such as the way Jane hints at something about a former professor (played by John Gallagher Jr.) of hers early on but won't broach the subject until much later, when she's comfortable enough with Will to tell that particular story.

On and on they talk, with Hale and Wolff giving compelling performances beyond their inherent romantic-comedy-lead charms. Which Brings Me to You is an intriguing spin on the formula of this genre. Whether or not there's a happy ending for the characters is almost beside the point. They're smart enough to question the notion of a relationship until the very end, and the film wisely assumes we're curious enough to do the same.

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