THE SKY IS FALLING: a review of "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World"

 

"SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD"

Written and Directed by Lorene Scafaria

**** (four stars)

"Ashes and diamonds
Foe and friend
We were all equal in the end..."
-Pink Floyd ("Two Suns In The Sunset")

"All I need is the air that I breathe and to love you."
-The Hollies ("The Air That I Breathe")

Dear readers, I want for you to file away the name "Lorene Scafaria" in your brains.

Scafaria, who previously obtained only one screen credit for writing the ambitious but poorly delivered "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist" (2008), has fully arrived with her first directorial effort and believe me when I express to you that it is a stunner. "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" is the boldest, bravest film I have seen this year so far and Scafaria has proven without any doubts that she is a filmmaker to watch closely in the future. With this very tricky story of two people seeking a meaningful connection just as the world is in its final days, Scafaria gracefully and confidently walks a knife's edge of concepts and styles while presenting her film with a masterful control of tonality from the very first scene all the way to its final, heartbreaking image. It is a supremely warm, humane experience that always remains emotionally unpredictable while the story itself heads full force towards a horrifically predictable conclusion. And furthermore, she has easily created the very best love story I have seen in quite some time. As of this time, the bos office for this movie has been decidedly weak and the public reaction towards the film has been surprisingly indifferent. If one were to hate this film, I could understand that but to feel indifferent?! It seems to me to be wholly impossible to feel indifferent towards a film of this kind, subject matter and tremendous quality. If you happen to live in Madison, I urge you to go out to our Sundance Cinemas theater and see it this week as I have been informed the film will not be screening next weekend. If you live elsewhere in the country, I urge you, just as emphatically, to go out quickly and give this film a chance. It, and Lorene Scafaria, more than deserve your time and hard earned dollar as this is one very special experience.

As Dodge Petersen (Steve Carell) and his wife sit in their idling car, "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" opens with news of despair and finality courtesy of a radio broadcast. An asteroid, 70 miles wide and code named "Matilda" is heading towards the Earth and the final scientific effort to destroy it has failed leaving three weeks remaining until the Earth's destruction. As the radio announcer immediately begins to play The Beach Boys' bittersweet classic "Wouldn't It Be Nice," Dodge's wife silently races from the car and completely out of his life.

With 21 days left until the end of the world, poor Dodge attempts to negotiate through the increasing meaninglessness of his life as an insurance salesman where "Casual Friday" office wear is now offered to wear everyday and also, there is a new opening for the C.F.O. position. He futily tries to allow his kindly housekeeper (Tonita Castro) the opportunity to cease cleaning his apartment. And his circle of friends (Rob Corddry, Connie Britton, Patton Oswalt) have all reacted to the coming apocalypse by engaging in their newly released hedonistic impulses of reckless drugs intake and sexual conquests. Feeling non-compelled to participate in anything of that sort, Dodge resigns himself to living out his last days and nights completely alone as attempting to connect with anyone new would be futile. But then, he meets Penny (Keira Knightley)...       

Penny is Dodge's neighbor, although they have never spoken to each other in the three years they have shared living space in the same apartment building. Dodge invites her into his apartment after spotting her sobbing on the fire escape outside of his window after a breakup. The twosome forge a tentative friendship. Penny soon, and apologetically, presents him with a piece of mail she mistaken received months earlier from a long-lost former girlfriend of Dodge's proclaiming that he was the love of her life.

As rioting and violence begin to plague the city and now reaching their apartment complex, Dodge, Penny and an abandoned dog that Dodge acquired upon waking up in a nearby park after a botched suicide attempt, escape in Penny's car. If Penny can get Dodge back to his former girlfriend, he will gurantee that he will get her to a friend who owns a plane and can get her back to England to see her family. From this point, "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" becomes a road trip filled with surprising revelations, developments and emotions as Dodge and Penny realize that they just may have found each other just in the nick of time, as the Earth is almost out of time.  

In descriptions for this film, I have heard some reviewers suggest that if Lars Von Trier's "Melancholia" (2011) happened to be a comedy, it would be this film. While the two films share obvious cataclysmic themes, to my perceptions, that description is nothing but lazy journalism. In my mind, "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" is much more closely aligned with Writer/Director Charlie Kaufman's one-of-a-kind "Synecdoche, New York" (2008). While that film focused on the increasingly fractured mind and soul of an artist going through the experience of aging and dying, Scafaria's film is also one that indeed forces the audience to ponder the very things you go to the movies to actually avoid. Musing over the final days of your life, your regrets, and having hopeless hopes that life will somehow turn out for the better, even in the face of an oncoming asteroid, are most certainly the very things that I would believe that none of us would like to think about for any stretch of time. And most certainly, none of us would like to think about how our final moments in the world will play out either. But, please allow me to assure you that Lorene Scafaria has not devised a pretentious, depressing film, although the film's final moments are incredibly wrenching. "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" is first and foremost a comedy. A very dark comedy that is filled to the brim with appropriately fatalistic, gallows humor (for instance, there's a brief early moment between Dodge and a small spider he spares from squashing comically illustrates how no good deeds go unpunished in a world heading towards extinction) but a comedy nonetheless. Scarfaria does not even try to scale the operatic heights set by Von Trier's "Melancholia" or nor should she.

"Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" possesses an inviting tone as Scafaria wants the audience to accompany Dodge, Penny and all of the characters upon their life-altering journeys. I loved how Scafaria never for an instant made any of her characters self-consciously quirky, a tone I just cannot stand in independent feature films. This is truly one film that is firmly grounded from the get-go and as I have previously stated, she elicits a mastery of tonality from start to finish. In regards to the world's conclusion, she presents the audience with no escape hatch to cling to at any moment. The world will end and there's nothing we can hope for and nothing we can do to change the outcome. Therefore, her film is one about our collective humanity and human behavior and what happens when our social rules and societal cues break down and become meaningless. She treats every single character with empathy and understanding, and no matter how outrageous the scenario (especially during a sequence set at a Friday's styled restaurant called "Friendsy's" contains some brutally sharp social satire), we are able to completely see how and why people are conducting themselves with certain behaviors they otherwise would not. Throughout the film, we meet a lonely truck driver (William Petersen), a survivalist and former lover of Penny's (Derek Luke) among others and at any moment, you could easily how other filmmakers would turn up the quirk factor and play every single moment for laughs. But not Scafaria. She is refreshingly real.

Scafaria also uses her mastery of tone to make sudden and brazen tonal shifts so we will not become too relaxed in her congenial style. The film contains several abrupt and shocking acts of violence, that interrupt the comedy, again bringing you back to the inevitability of the end of the world. Of course, we would expect moments of violence and rioting. But Scafaria allows scenes to fully breathe, and it is in the quieter visuals and actions where the poignancy of  "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" stands tallest. Watching someone mowing their lawn, seeing people returning to work and going about their everyday business, even with the full knowledge that it is all for naught, perfectly summed up our human condition. Seriously, what else would we do when we know not to do anything else? Her usage of music is also stellar as she mines the deep melancholy of seemingly innocuous pop songs for tremendous effect. I don't think that The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe" or The Walker Brothers' "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" have ever held such heartbreaking power for me. And another selection by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, penned by Burt Bacharach and Hal David entitled "The Guy's In Love With You," perfectly sets the stage for the film's overwhelmingly effective conclusion. Scafaria has us laughing and then we're horrified and then, we are meditative, heartbroken and laughing all over again and all the while, we are increasingly swept up in the shared experience of Dodge and Penny.   

As much of the film consists of just the two of them and our connection to their connection is crucial to the film's success, the performances of Steve Carell and Keira Knightley are pivotal.  Thankfully, the two greatly rise to the challenge of Scafaria's beautifully written screenplay and bring out some of their finest work to date.

At first, the role of Dodge as played by Steve Carell, seems to be yet one more in his growing line of cinematic sad sacks as we have already seen in "Little Miss Sunshine" (2007), "Dan In Real Life" (2007) and last year's "Crazy, Stupid Love." In all three of those films, carell ave fine performances but for this film, he truly digs his deepest yet. Carell becomes a true "everyman" in the very best sense of the word as we can easily see ourselves firmly within his shoes and he makes all of his motivations clear and clean while also containing a world of emotions. His performance is one of such skill and empathy that he truly reminded me of some of William Hurt's best performances from the 1980s, where Hurt always found a way to embody the soul of the faceless man who daily wears a suit and tie. Carell is indeed that strong and believe it or not, he makes for a throughouly convincing romantic lead as he carries supreme levels of tenderness, patience, pain, darkness, sorrow, grace and of course, humor. Steve Carell is marvelous.

Keira Knightley, at last released from all sorts of cinematic corsets, gives a thoroughly winning performance as Penny. This is an especially terrific feat as this character is more difficult to pull off successfully and she is also the one who would be most endangered to fall into the endless abyss of self-conscious quirkiness. Penny is indeed a bit eccentric. She speaks quickly, is a bit of a free spirit, a self-described "optimist" born to parents she describes as "romantics." She is a music fanatic, adores the world of vinyl albums and even carries an armload with her upon her cross country journey with Dodge. And she also suffers from  hypersomnia as she is able to sleep through nearly anything and even jokes that she might even sleep through the apocalypse. (Frankly, if I knew the apocalypse were to occur, I would want nothing more than to be in the safety of hearth and home and more than willing to sleep through it as I just would not want to experience something like that.) Yet, Scafaria, through her excellent screenplay and gorgeous dialogue, makes Penny a full blooded, three dimensional human being. Knightley's completely engaging performance elevates Scafaria's writing grandly and makes Penny a heroine one would love to spend their final days on Earth with. And it is within that very feeling where the film finds its largest heart, as it is also a love story.

"Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World," with the characters of Dodge and Penny at its core, becomes an intimate love story that builds into a cosmically epic one due to its urgency and the aching desire for these two lonely souls to find a connection, even though it is doomed to not last long. Yet, that is what makes their story so luxuriously beautiful and even life affirming. That even at the very end, to know that your existence was not in vain, that your life truly meant something to another, that your mere presence brought light to at least one other person is to give your own life a sense of meaning and validation. This film is a story about two people finding a powerful sense of significance when the universe is rendering them completely insignificant. I know that I have made a reference to the film's final scene and while I would never fully reveal it, I will say that the words Dodge says and how Penny reacts to those words were so simple and yet completely soul stirring. This film could not have had a better ending if it tried.

For me, a love story of this scale reminded me tremendously of Director Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind" (2004), also written by Charlie Kaufman, and a film that I felt contained my favorite love story of the past decade in film. And reaching back even further, this film also reminded me of Writer/Director Steve De Jarnatt's "Miracle Mile" (1988), a romantic comedy first date film that quickly shifts into a nightmarish nuclear war race against time. Both of those films plus "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" present painful love stories set against the unfair, unforgiving and downright arbitrary nature of time itself. Yet, what we do with the time we are given is entirely up to us.     

Please do not allow this subject matter to frighten you away. Please do not fear that you will be balled up in a corner after walking out of the theater. Yes, I was very shaken once the film concluded and the first thing I wanted to do was to talk to someone about it. This is a memorable film, to say the least. An emotional experience that looks fearlessly into the core of our humanity and as far as film storytelling is concerned, it is a film that envisions the end of the world just as fearlessly and through a grim social comedy of manners to boot.

But, if we leave the theater just wondering how we can make our time, how ever long we may be blessed with having it, more bearable for others as well as ourselves, then I believe that a film like this is more than worth celebrating. A film that asks us to truly value the people we know and just tell them what they mean to us, is a film to champion. Lorene Scafaria has created an astounding debut directorial feature and while I cannot imagine what she could make next, especially after ending existence itself, I know that I am very anxious to see it.

"Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" is one of 2012's very best films.