Director: Josh Boone
Talent: Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, Lily Collins, Nat Wolff
Release Date: 14th June 2013
Writer-director Josh Boone’s debut feature centres on a family broken by infidelity, divorce and blame, yet in spite of its good intentions, Stuck in Love begs to be written off as a sappy, indie-romantic dramedy. Greg Kinnear stars as the likeable Bill Borgens, an unhappily divorced novelist and father to two teenage children who are also talented writers. For a film about a family of writers, there is very little writing going on. With words at times scrawled across the screen and several literary references strewn about, it is clear that Boone intends to enlighten us about the difficult plight of the writer and the creative process. Instead we are led to believe that writing and critical acclaim go hand in hand, and that the former requires little more than a bit of life experience.
The film presents love as a struggle where loss — of a parent, of affection, of trust — and longing are endlessly wrestled with. But the cookie-cutter characters fail to convey any depth or be anything but predictable: the romantic idealist experiences his first and imperfect love and the cynical commitment-phobe fails to resist the hopeless romantic. Although the ending is one of rampant wish-fulfilment, we somehow cannot begrudge the dysfunctional Borgens their happy ending. Stuck in Love is sweetly optimistic, occasionally enjoyable but ultimately forgettable.
