Going the Distance fails to go distance

"Going the distance" can mean any of a number of things.

It can mean traveling across the country for a relationship or being willing to give up your career. It can mean buying your lover flowers or being willing to interrupt your sister's husband's midnight snack to dry-hump on the dining table. It can mean flying thousands of miles or driving across town to see the newest movie. For anyone planning to go the distance, the important question to ask is whether the reward (love, sex, a decent movie night) is worth the necessary sacrifice (career, dignity, $10 tickets and $11 popcorn). For the potential viewer of Going the Distance, the distance probably isn't worth the effort.  

The film stars on-again off-again real-life couple Drew Barrymore and Justin Long as two early thirty-somethings stuck between unrealized career dreams and cross-country romance. The plot is relatively familiar. Is it that so many of us have been through this exact dilemma before? After all, this is college. Many of us had high school sweethearts, and maybe for a few minutes, we considered going to different schools to be with them. Then again, maybe the dilemma seems so familiar because thousands of other romantic comedies have done this before. 

The film has its necessary hilarities. Justin Long's roommate, played by Charlie Day, listens to Long and Barrymore's conversations through the wall and blasts an impromptu soundtrack on his stereo. Long forgets to don his mini goggles and flails around in panic inside a spray-tan booth. Long and Barrymore start to have steamy, passionate sex on the dinner table, only to realize that Barrymore's brother-in-law is trying to enjoy a late-night sandwich. The best part of the movie is watching the stars' chemistry. Maybe having a real-life relationship helps, because I can't remember the last time I saw such a convincing couple in a romantic comedy. 

However, Going the Distance most often reads like a contrived piece of masturbatory screenwriting crap. The dialogue, situations, and references just reek of a screenwriter out of touch with reality. Every other line name-drops obscure (or obscure-sounding) indie bands and better movies, because we're supposed to buy these characters as "hipsters." Barrymore is an aspiring reporter, and Long is an aspiring record producer. They live in San Francisco and New York City and spend their nights partying with friends at local bars, looking absolutely gorgeous and moaning about their less-than-fabulous lives (lives which 90 percent of the audience wish they could have). 

The only people who could get away with writing this and actually believing its realism are high school and college students whose only real-world experience comes from dreams and movies, and screenwriters too busy looking at their own swimming pools to remember that life really isn't like that. 

It's not that this movie is especially bad. It's just been done thousands of times before, and better. If it comes on TV late at night, months from now, it won't stand out any more than most of the other pointless romantic comedies out there. It is possible to take a contrived idea and make it fresh and new and worthwhile, but that isn't what happened here. In the end, the filmmakers were just too afraid to go the distance. 

Grade: C+