How to be Single tells the story of four single women in New York City. Alice (Dakota Johnson), who has never been good at staying single, is taking a break from her boyfriend of four years to find out who she is. Her extremely outgoing co-worker Robin (Rebel Wilson) is her guide through singledom, pushing her to have fun and hook up with guys. Alice's older sister Meg (Leslie Mann) has spent her youth focused on her career as an obstetrician, and is just now realizing that she wants to have a child. Lucy (Alison Brie) wants to be married, and is dating with the sole purpose of looking for Mr. Right.
The movie’s opening narration explains that there are many different ways to be single. Each of these characters is meant to represent those varying approaches. Alice doesn’t know what she’s doing, Robin is wild and happy to sleep around, Meg seems to be content to go it alone, and Lucy is obsessed with ending up with the right guy. To its credit, the movie isn’t prescriptive. It isn’t trying to tell audiences that there is a right way to be single. But it’s tough to say if the movie is saying anything at all. There are moments of grace in this hodgepodge of scenes of single life, but it’s hard to find anything to hold it all together.
The movie suffers from a lack of focus. It’s especially felt in the parts that involve Lucy, who doesn’t have much to do with the other characters in the story. Though wonderfully portrayed by Alison Brie, her scenes feel like a severe diversion from the rest of the narratives. Robin, for most of the movie, is more of a construct than a character. She’s there to loud and outgoing and funny, but she’s more of a distraction than anything else. And then there’s the men in these movie, who also seem to be going through their own little crises. The movie’s meatiest storylines involve Alice and Meg, but having to share the runtime with two other characters ends up arresting their development.
Alice is learning that it’s okay to be alone, while Meg is learning the opposite. It’s kind of clever, but not built well enough. Alice is basically made to drift in and out of lives of a few men, and it’s never really clear what the big fuss is. The movie makes her out to be a little too helpless, her struggles manifested mainly through her inability to unzip her own dresses. Meg’s journey to motherhood and relationship bliss has its charms, but it never gets deep enough to earn its eventual resolution.
None of it is even really bad. The ingredients are there for an atypical romantic comedy, one that tries to navigate the tricky landscape of a modern romance, which all at once celebrates the independence of singlehood but pines for the fantasy of the perfect relationship. But it’s all terribly undercooked. There isn’t enough to these stories to leave anything of real value. This is in spite of a steady technical package and solid performances from everyone involved. Leslie Mann, in particular, is kind of affecting in this movie. Her story falls short, but the actress almost carries it through anyway.
How to be Single is based on a novel, and that kind of shows. It does suffer from the kind of problems that plague adaptations; its loose, disjointed structure indicative of a very different form of storytelling. There are good ideas in here, and the film actually ends in a pretty nice place. But the path there feels terribly unfocused, the narrative taking large jumps through time and space, never really settling down long enough to really figure out what these characters are thinking. The film asks that we cherish being single, but it doesn’t seem to try very hard to cherish the time the characters spend alone.
My Rating:
