A Few Days Too Many

The day in “One Day” is July 15, when Emma and Dexter, about to graduate from college, tumble into bed, grope awkwardly but venture no further, and declare that they will “just be friends.” From there the date — St. Swithin’s Day, when the English look for signs of what their weather will be for the next 40 days of summer — becomes the film’s conceit: Emma and Dex will meet or talk every July 15. The couple, well played by Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway, are a study in contrasts: He’s posh, rich and easygoing, a magnet for the babes he beds serially; she’s working class, a little mousey, uptight, lacking in confidence, caustic in flashes. Sturgess has no problem playing pretty and rich; there is something of Hugh Grant in him. For Hathaway, mousey and English is more difficult: She hides her large, luminous eyes behind big, round spectacles and adopts an accent from somewhere — the location shifts and finally disappears altogether — in North England. Tediously, this couple is the last to figure out they are destined for each other. Dex playboys around London; Emma loses all ambition while waitressing in a Mexican restaurant (doubtless based on the famous one in Covent Garden) in sombrero and boots and gives up her ambition, writing. But July 15 survives: They even take a beach holiday together, but Emma’s rules of non-engagement yield platonic skinny-dipping.They still don’t get it. Act two is about character development. Dex, a rather nasty drunk and druggie, now, becomes famous as the host of a dumb TV variety show; Emma gets a teacher’s certificate and a live-in boyfriend (played by a very fine Ian Spall), one of those physically awkward, overgrown puppy types with neither sophisticated looks nor timing. (He is a very bad would-be comedian.) Dex loses his mother (a wonderful Patricia Clarkson) to cancer and enters an iffy marriage with an adulterous wife. Both Dex and Emma are getting older, although the only changes seem to be their hairstyles. Finally in the third act, Emma has become a successful author and — throwing off her ugly duckling routine — a swan; Dex is drug and wife free. They meet in Paris where she is working on a book and a new boyfriend, and voila, here comes the big kiss, the one we’ve been waiting for through oh, so many Julys. But where most writers and filmmakers would have stopped there, we push on through some more years and then get gobsmacked, literally out of nowhere, and invited to shed copious tears in a melodramatic but effective ending. So “One Day” is a film that actually gathers momentum as it rolls by. But 20 July days spread over 20 years is a long slog and a long time to wait for the payoff we always knew was coming and the ending we didn’t. The premise works much better in the book, since we’re used to chapters dividing action. Here it can seem tortured and constricting. “One Day” isn’t a bad movie; it’s just not as good as it should have been. “One Day” is showing in Millerton, Great Barrington and Torrington. It is rated PG-13.