'One True Loves' is even worse than its title
Hulu
Never let anyone say that “One True Loves” doesn’t inspire feeling. It should motivate absolutely every viewer to scream “Why do you feel that way?!” and “You are the most boring person I’ve ever seen!” and “He was gone for four years! Ask about it!”
To a shocking extent, this adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s book (also shocking: Reid co-wrote the appalling script with her husband Alex) is hollow and horrifying at nearly every moment, as if this is a parody of a Hallmark movie. This is a real exchange: “What is your sister doing?” “Living.” People who love movies about love should hate this vapid glide across the surface, where nothing has any depth or information and it’s all just love and I’ve always loved you and I love her the most and do you love him more than me?
I just Googled Reid (“Daisy Jones and the Six,” “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo”) and found out she is nearly 40, not 12. Based on “One True Loves,” this is surprising.
Suggesting that director Andy Fickman (whose filmography includes treats like “She’s the Man,” “The Game Plan” and “Parental Guidance”) told her to look as blank as possible for as long as possible, love triangle veteran Phillipa Soo (“Hamilton”) stars as Emma, who’s faced with a seemingly impossible choice after her husband Jesse (Luke Bracey of the “Point Break” remake) returns from four years on a deserted island and isn’t thrilled that Emma’s engaged to her childhood best friend Sam (Simu Liu of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”). That might sound like a juicy fork in the road, and perhaps on page it is. On screen, the film, which incorporates some of the worst structural screenwriting I’ve seen in years, rejects complexity and detail and hasn’t a clue what its characters actually think about anything beyond “Do you love this person?” and “Do you want to travel or live in a quaint Massachusetts town?” No consideration has been given to Sam’s romantic life in the meantime or any believable interaction that would speak to people intelligently figuring out compatibility.
This is all cliches, all the time, with Emma’s family of course owning a bookstore that in her younger days she has no interest in and Sam of course being a genius musician who teaches kids, in contrast with Jesse’s responsibility-free world-traveler. There are nods to Joan Didion and Elton John but nobody here has conversations about anything they should have conversations about, in the past or the present, thinking about last week or this morning or next year. It’s insultingly shallow and only gets shallower, depicting actors feebly attempting to mimic emotion despite the characters having so incredibly little between them. You actually have to chronicle people experiencing things together; instead, “One True Loves” is a situation in search of a plot.
The only place this movie might work would be if it were playing exclusively on a tiny screen in a tiny bookstore visited by a mouse in a story about a shop that was trying to drive away its customers. Actually, that would still be too meaningful and reflect more thought than was put into “One True Loves,” which is what it looks like when a mindless movie desperate for swoons also suffers from a total absence of cute.
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