The story opens on July 15, 1988 with two lovely English students Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) spending college graduation night together. They never quite make love – she has to brush her teeth, the sun is rising, Tracy Chapin music is a killjoy – but they make the ties that bind for a life long friendship that will recur on the anniversary of THAT date for the next twenty years. Sometimes they’ll find themselves together on July 15th, and sometimes they won’t. But they’re always a phone call away. And they’re always in each other’s hearts, at least while Emma is a waitress and Dexter is a professor in Paris who seduces his female students.
In 1992 they finally meet on their anniversary to take a holiday. There’s not much chemistry between the two and we wonder why he bothers with this frigid, inhibited, and all around negative creature so judgmental in bad British accent.
But then the course changes. Dex becomes a trashy TV host – sort of the Ryan Seascrest of Late Night TV suddenly striving to be less, while Emma strives to become more. A published author and a school teacher, she ends up marrying Ian (Raffe Spall) a wanna-be comedian with bad teeth and worse lines.
The movie moves awkwardly into the-same-time-next-year reminiscent of a film Alan Alda did by the same name that was delightful. But in this case, and by the time 1998 rolls around, we hope we don’t have to endure the film until 2011. But alas, we do, and just when you might walk out, suddenly it’s 2003 and the story sticks. It took a few years and a few pages, but the characters even out to a workable comfort zone. For a short time anyway.
Surprisingly the viewer might shed a tear, but not at the moment you’d suspect. Instead at various moments and stages that might be reflective of each of our own loves who slipped away. Two and a half tiaras