Watched this for valentine’s day, so figured I’d post before the week of valentine’s is done.
I like romcoms pretty well, but I’m not all that into weddings. I didn’t have one of my own (we got married in our courtyard with a couple of friends and a cat). Big parties aren’t my thing in general and the rituals of public declaration mostly make me itch.
If you love weddings, I’m not judging! To each their own, and obviously many people find them satisfying. But I think it’s important not to mistake the wedding (which is over fairly quickly) with the relationship (which ideally, is not.) A certain number of romcoms do just that—and Andrew Rhymer and Jeff Chan’s Plus One (2019) more consciously and tenaciously than most.
Plus One’s couple is Alice (Maya Erskine) and Ben (Jack Quaid). They’ve been friends since college; Maya is recovering from a brutal breakup, and Ben just can’t find the right someone. They figure their misery will feel less miserable if they team up, so they decide to be each other’s plus one for a series of ten weddings during the spring/summer season. As they attend the nuptials of old college friends, relatives, sisters, and dads, they discover they’re in love, have Doubts, and then (Spoiler!) live happily ever after.
Which is all pleasant enough. Maya Erskine playing a drunk force of chaos is a blast to watch, and Jack Quaid is…fine.
The problem, though, is that weddings aren’t real life. We pretty much only see Alice and Ben when they’re planning to go to a wedding or are actually at a wedding. Alice is drunk a remarkable amount of the time, which is probably not the case in her daily life. We barely ever see the two of them interacting in their homes; we don’t know what their jobs are. Four Weddings and a Funeral finessed this issue by providing a portrait of a tight knit group of friends to give context to the central relationship—and by throwing in that funeral, which deepened the characters by allowing you to see them in grief as well as celebration. But Plus One doesn’t do that. It’s just Jack and Alice, just at weddings.
That’s not exactly a misstep. Instead, it’s a function of the film’s actual theme. Plus One is less a love letter to love than a love letter to weddings. Ben eventually breaks up with Alice because he feels like they don’t have the starry eyed, never-doubt, eternal love that all his friends are declaring to each other in their vows. His friend Matt (Beck Bennett) (who has almost no character development) gives the film’s statement of purpose speech, in which he explains that no one is certain of love. But, he contends, it’s worth it because it’s awesome to tell someone you love them in public and hear them say you love them. The wedding in this formulation isn’t a way to commemorate your love; it’s the reason to fall in love in the first place. Which leaves an awful lot of life to live with your love after the reason for loving them is supposedly gone.
I doubt Plus One exactly means that to be its message; the point is supposed to be that Ben is holding himself to an impossibly high standard for partners because his parent’s divorce messed him up and he has to heal and become a better person. But it’s hard not to notice that the film more committed to the weddings than to the couple. There are a series of best man and maid of honor speeches which range from cringe to charming and back again—the older geeky brother who hasn’t found a wife yet fumbling drunkenly through his regrets while people shout at him to speak louder is the highlight or lowlight, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it’s clear that the directors love these emotionally intense, dorky, stagey moments in which private love, private jealousy, private pain, and private hope, is put out there for all the world to see.
Weddings are photogenic; they look good on screen, with the nice clothes and the big emotions. But relationships don’t really happen in public, for the most part, and taking out the garbage for one another year after year, decade after decade, isn’t something that fits easily into either cringe or cute. Plus One loves the spectacle of love, but it’s not clear it really loves Alice and Ben, or wants to take the time to get us to love them. “Weddings are bad for me,” Ben quips at one point. Too many of them, Plus One suggests, may be bad for romcoms too.
I wonder about the whole wedding thing- I’ve been married (mostly happily) for 30 years- and starting off with a massively expensive show of “love” just seems to celebrate before a couple has accomplished anything. Falling in love is easy. Staying in love, and sticking out the rough spots so you can fall in love all over again- that takes tenacity, and commitment, and forgiveness and trying to be a better person. I could go on. I’m for celebrating anniversaries. (Fwiw, we had a small, cheap wedding at the courthouse.)
Maya Erskine won my heart in "Pen15"