Ryan McNeil
Sometimes in life, you have to contend with everything all at once. You can wake up one morning and suddenly find yourself at odds with your job, your relationship, your family, your city, even yourself. How we conduct ourselves in these battles doesn’t matter as much as who we get to fight alongside us.
Lola (Greta Gerwig) loves and lives with Luke (Joel Kinnamen). Luke asks her to marry him, but for reasons only he knows, he gets cold feet and calls it off mere weeks before the big day. Lola is understandably a wreck, and turns to her friends and family for support.
In doing so she learns a bit more about her friends than she does about herself. For instance, she learns that living life like her friend Alice (Zoe Lister Jones) isn’t going to work for her, because spending more than two minutes inside a club in the hopes of meeting guys gives her panic attacks.
She also learns that her closest male friend, a guy she’s been close with for years named Henry (Haymish Linklater), has feelings for her. He hasn’t been sitting to the side pining for all this time, but he’s known that he wanted to be with her of the opportunity presents itself. The question Lola needs to ask herself now, is whether she should present the opportunity…and what it will ultimately take to get over Luke and take control of her life again.
You might think that one’s opinion of LOLA VERSUS is directly hinged upon one’s opinion of Lola herself. That would be a fair assumption since Lola carries the load in the story and is in every scene. If we’re going to hang out with her for 90 minutes, we darned well had better like her, right? What’s more is that we not only have to like Lola, but also have to empathize with her since we are following her at such a low moment…where one is prone to some really bad decision-making.
Spending time with this sort of sad-sack isn’t everybody’s idea of a great time, but Gerwig plays Lola in such a delicate introspection leaving us wanting to take care of her. I’m not deeply steeped in Gerwig’s work, but so far this might be the most interesting character I’ve seen her play. There’s a fine line between evoking sympathy and off-putting, and she always finds the right side of that divide.
No – liking Lola isn’t enough in this film, you have to be able to put up with the people around her too, and that’s where the movie starts to become a test. She spends an awful lot of time with Alice, but given how useless Alice is, I can only surmise that Lola is around due to lack of options. Lola is out-of-sorts because she’s just had her life thrown into upheaval: Alice seems like she came out of the package out-of-sorts. She is of no use to Lola, so every moment she finds herself involved in another silly antic was a moment I felt antsy.
Then there’s the boys, who are equally useless…though that might be part of the point. I can’t gripe much about Lola staying tethered to her ex, because that’s what people do. I can gripe about Henry and the way he took advantage of a vulnerable friend, because I feel like a loveable doofus like him should know better. If he’s been Lola’s friend as long as we’re led to believe, he wouldn’t make his move when she’s so fragile. Or, if he must, and he finds himself angry with how it all shakes out, he certainly wouldn’t do what he does in the film’s final act.
Don’t even get me started on the wild salmon loving, Ani DiFranco listening, massively endowed Nick who’s just too much of a cartoon for words.
These characters are what damned near cripple LOLA VERSUS. Anybody who has gone through anything like what Lola goes through knows damned well how much it shatters a person. It’s a Herculean task just to get out of bed in the morning, let alone try to redefine who you are as an individual and start moving forward. In times like these, all one has is their braintrust…and if their braintrust is populated by a bunch of flakes, well, they’re pretty much screwed.
As if the posse of dimwits wasn’t enough, LOLA VERSUS feels a bit rushed and fragmented as a narrative. If we’re going to catch up with Lola at the difficult time that we do, then I want to sit down and read a memoir of what happened to her and how it all played in her head. Instead, the uneven transitions make me feel less like I’m reading her memoir, and more like I’m skimming her blog.
As messy as I found it, I did enjoy most of the time I spent with Lola as she got her head sorted out. She might not make some of the best decisions in this story, but when we’re feeling messed up most of us make bad decisions. It’s fitting that Lola herself is fascinated by silence in poetry – the moments in between moments. In many ways this film shows us Lola in that very state: After one important chapter of her life and before the next. She’ll get things sorted out eventually, but for now we sit with her in silence…in a moment between moments.
This is in my to watch list. your review is really nicely put and certainly gives me a few things to look out for and base my own opinions on. Thank you. x
Welcome to The Matinee Girl!
It’s worth a look for sure, for Gerwig’s performance if for no other reason. Looking around at other reviews, it seems like it’s being unfairly scorned…which I don’t quite get.
It’s got a few interesting things to say for sure.
I don’t know Greta Gerwig’s work, that’s why she seemed an interesting fresh face, when I saw the trailer. I have no idea if I like this film but I’ll give it a go, when it’s here.
I know her most from her turn in last year’s remake of ARTHUR with Russell Brand, and her part in this year’s DAMSELS IN DISTRESS (which might not have opened out your way yet). I’m taking quite a liking to her work, so you might want to look at some of her stuff!
Thanks for the review, this seemed like something that I might have gotten around too eventually, but now I think I might push it off until much later. Thanks for your thoughts, they were most helpful.
Anytime – As much as I found things in it that I enjoyed, it’s very much a “wait for Netflix/blu-ray” sort of title. Lots of better things out there to see.
I like Greta Gerwig. She has a nice screen presence, and I think she is tremendous in Greenberg, but the movie is such a mess. The Alice character is one of the more annoying characters on screen in quite some time. She might as well has a sign on her forehead that says: “Look at me, I am QUIRKY and WACKY”. (Normally, I would be easy on the actress who plays Alice, but she also wrote the movie) Lola’s parents also the hippie mom and dad that only appears in movies like this. The male characters are such cliches. When you add to the fact that there is no way a waitress can afford a nice little loft in NY, I have a hard time finding anything believable in LOLA VERSUS.
Gotta remember, her place is just a little cubby-hole bachelor; It’s only when she was splitting the bills with Luke that she could afford the loft…which even then was enormous.
I hear what you’re saying about Alice, but she didn’t strike me as wacky as she did sorta dim. I liked that she looked after Lola when she was at her very lowest (giving her a place to crash, making sure she got out of the house), but after she applies the emotional first aid, her idiocy stands in front of her getting Lola back to good health.
Not deep cinema by any stretch, but not bad on the whole.
Great review, Ryan! Liked how you described Lola and Gerwig’s portrayal of her.
There are a few characters in TV & film like Lola right now. I’m finding more than anything else what determines if they pass/fail is how much I like the character and how much time I want to spend with them.
Yes, that is essential.
I don’t want to read too far, but I’m interested in anything Gerwig is in. I think she’s absolutely stunning — calm, emotionally captivating, raw, and simply wonderful to watch on screen.
Sorry I’ve been a bit MIA as of late.
Will respond to your email soon enough.
Probably for the best as I’m a little more specific in this review than I usually am (take the abstract nature of CAFE DE FLORE for example)
And don’t worry about being slightly absentee. We’ll keep a place set for you anytime you want to come back to the table.