Belated film reviews: Waiting For Forever

Spoiler alert: This is going to be a more positive review. Hurray!

As I often do, I jumped into 2010's rom-com Waiting For Forever with a two-line premise I found on Google and, this time around, a wider knowledge of the cast. I usually don't base my decisions to watch films on who stars in them, but I recognised Rachel Bilson on the poster and, as a The O.C and Hart Of Dixie fan, I was excited to see her in something else. See, I love Rachel Bilson. She is most famously known for her portrayal of Summer Roberts in The O.C, the quintessential 00s girl. Summer was never as dumb as she looked on the surface, always a fashion icon of the times, popular at school but with a heart of gold, just the right amount of sassy, a little bit celeb-obsessed, and all-around adorable. Through Summer, Rachel Bilson encapsulated the 00s at their best. Then, she found herself with the main role in Hart Of Dixie, the one of Zoe Hart, a fast-talking big city doctor who ends up having to move to Bluebell, the tiniest of towns in Alabama. Technically, I started watching it because of her, but then again, Hart Of Dixie has everything I could possibly want from a TV show: a little bit of cheese and a lot of wholesomeness, outstanding fashion, utterly lovable characters, small-town America, pick-up trucks, and just enough drama, sass, and plaid shirts to keep me entertained. I really wish Rachel Bilson had a similar career trajectory as Jennifer Aniston: personifying the core aesthetic of a decade in an iconic TV show, and moving on to be the queen of romantic comedies we deserved.

(But while writing this, I discovered that Bilson, along with Melinda Clarke, are about to start a podcast to discuss The O.C, and that's good enough for me.)

Rachel Bilson's co-star in Waiting For Forever is Tom Sturridge, which immensely appealed to the eighteen, nineteen-year-old version of me. In my world, Sturridge is mostly known for playing Young Carl in The Boat That Rocked, one of my favourite films in the entire universe, and one of my ultimate feel-good movies. Younger me had a bit of a crush on him, I must admit, and I was more than happy to relive those years through seeing Tom Sturridge star in something else than my regular rewatches of The Boat That Rocked.

About Waiting For Forever, Google says: "A street performer has no ambition other than reconnecting with his best friend from childhood and pursuing a romance with her," and I can now officially announce, about twenty-four hours post-viewing, that I completely misread that sentence. I sincerely, genuinely read something along the lines of "A street artist returns to his hometown with the goal of reconnecting with his best friend from childhood," and I thought, well, that sounds really adorable. Maybe if I had actually processed the words correctly, I would have known before pressing play that it would be a little darker than your average romantic comedy, and maybe, just maybe, I would not have jumped into it thinking it would be "really cute."

Waiting For Forever is many things, but "really cute" doesn't spring to mind post-watching, which is a bit of a shame when it comes to a rom-com. But, then again, I don't consider it a rom-com. Also, despite the words "a bit of a shame," it isn't a bad film. Just different from anything I was expecting.

We follow Will as he hitchhikes his way from Los Angeles, California, to middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, which is, according to Google Maps, a twenty-seven-hour drive, depending on where you go in Pennsylvania and how much traffic you have to sit through when leaving Los Angeles. He ends up telling the story behind his journey to the couple who take him for most of the way and, about ten minutes in, I realised this wasn't going to be "really cute." At least, not entirely.

Will and Emma met when they were children in middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, and soon became inseparable. One random and blissful day when Will was showing off in class to impress Emma, the teacher turns the radio on, and the kids find out there has been a serious train accident somewhere in between their town and New York City, and many people are injured. Let's pause here for a second: do teachers really turn the news on when important events happen in their town? A Concorde plane crashed in my department when I was nine or ten, subsequently stopping all Concorde flights for the rest of eternity, and we weren't told at school. I found out on the news at home, just like everyone else. Is this a normal thing? Is this an American thing? Later that day, Will goes home with Emma, his parents are still not back from watching a musical in New York City and, the next morning, when their car still wasn't there, he understood they would never come back and were part of the casualties. Will and his older brother, Jim, move to Massachusetts with their aunt, and Will and Emma keep in touch for a few years, through occasional visits, then letters, and then, as happens to the best of us, they grow up and grow apart.

That's another moment that, objectively, should have ticked me off. Will tells this story with stars in his eyes, almost like the untimely death of his parents was a stepping stone in his love story with Emma. He actually never says that they are dead, he only says they "never came back," and mostly mentions what Emma told him that night, that he would always be loved. Technically, Will is deadset on finding a girl to tell her he loves her, always has, always will, except that they haven't had any sort of contact for a decade, roughly, give or take a few years.

But there was Rachel Bilson and Tom Sturridge, dopey smiles and stars everywhere, a nostalgic feel, and some sort of sepia filter on the screen (think RuPaul's Drag Race season 1, but less blurry), and I really wanted it to be a cute film.

Will arrives in middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, and happily skips to the local bank to see his brother Jim, who is visibly embarrassed to be associated with a grown adult man in a bowler hat who wears pyjamas and still gives him childhood nicknames. After a short conversation between the free-spirited brother and the 9-to-5-job brother, Will makes his way to a furniture store owned by his best friend, one he has actually remained in touch with, Joe.

The actor who plays Joe, Nelson Franklin, reminded me of one of the guys in Flight of the Conchords, and I half-expected him to break into Fou du Fafa every time he appeared on screen.

Joe, his wife Dolores, and his young son are more enthusiastic to see him, even though he jumps on the furniture a lot, and they encourage him when he tells about his plan to tell Emma he loves her and that, in his dreams, he breathes her in, inhales her, and she becomes the blood in his veins. There was a brief moment during which the women in the scene (Dolores and a customer) found this particularly adorable and swoon-worthy, but I personally don't.

Call me cynical, but the idea of someone you haven't seen in a decade telling you they dream about inhaling you into their bloodstream freaks me out a little bit.

Grown-up Emma is an actress who seems quite famous in Los Angeles and gets recognised by a taxi driver on the way back. The show she starred in has just been cancelled, and she comes back to her hometown to visit her parents. From the first scene she appears in, you can tell that Emma's mother, Miranda, is the kind of woman who likes things tidy and the way they should be and is scared of big feelings and disrupting the status quo. She keeps telling her daughter that she looks happy and well. Look, Miranda. I've seen four seasons of The O.C and four seasons of Hart Of Dixie, I can tell Rachel Bilson's miserable. So can anyone with a functioning pair of eyes.

Richard, Emma's father is severely ill and half-heartedly jokes about it, tries to make light of it, much to the despair of Miranda, who wishes he were more serious about it, but also, not say he is dying, because, in her mind, he isn't. Aaron, Emma's boyfriend who hasn't come to middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania with her, surprises her with a visit and, while Miranda is delighted to finally meet him, Emma throws various trinkets and vases at him from across the living-room. Shockingly, Miranda leads him to the kitchen and offers him a drink while taking a singular bite off of an apple, and Emma's father walks downstairs to check why some random boy he's never met just walked into his home to tell his daughter that he forgave her. See, this scene is just bizarre to me. Surely, if your daughter starts throwing ceramics at someone in the living room, you'd tell the guy to come back at another time, at least so you can understand what's happening?

In the meantime, Will has knocked on the Twists' door, hoping to talk to Emma, but had a panic attack on the doormat and the door closed on him.

Jim picks Will up from the street and takes him home for dinner. Speaking of Hart Of Dixie! Jim's wife, Susan, is played by none other than Jaime King, who portrays Lemon Breeland in the show. (Coincidentally, Jaime King also appeared in an episode of The O.C.) Will entertains Jim's children, juggles, jumps on the furniture a lot, and, towards the end of dinner, there is a confrontation between him and Jim. As mentioned earlier, Will is a street performer, and Jim becomes very aggressive about how much money he earns, where he lives, and whether or not he pays income tax on it. (I'm sorry, what now? Your brother lives on forty dollars a day, leave him alone.) Then, he doesn't appreciate Will telling his children that "everything is peachy" when life is quite generally hard. While I can see his point in not wanting his children to grow up believing the world is a fairytale, I find it hard to side with a man who has a healthy wife and kids, a good job, a mansion with a swimming pool, and his shit together when he claims that "life is not peachy." That all seems pretty peachy to me.

Will ends up staying the night with Joe and Dolores, and it's at their store, the next day, after Will leaves to find Emma, that the proper shift happens in the movie, from "still potentially cute" to "what have I got myself into." Jim comes to the store and confronts Joe about encouraging Will to confess his feelings to Emma, because he's still struggling with their parents' death, and still talks to them out loud. Also, he doesn't know that they weren't in New York to see a musical the day they died, they were in New York because his mother was ill and needed to see cancer specialists.

There's the start of the heartbreak.

Sure, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that Will has an issue with social cues, a slight anxiety disorder, and lives in a world of his own. But it's painful to realise that it's more serious than that. He's not just a quirky guy who's differently adjusted in society. He's an overgrown kid who has never really processed his parents' death, is probably extremely lonely, and that scene, right here, in the furniture store, is the catalyst to everything else. You see Will from a different perspective, and you also see Jim from a different perspective. He's not the mean, boring, settled man who's complaining about life not being peachy at all times. He's not the villain you want to hate because he claims life isn't peachy when he's rich, loved, and successful. He's a lot more than that because not everything is black and white.

Miranda has a similar sort of breakthrough after arguing with her husband about death. Finally, she breaks down, shows emotion, and confronts the big feelings she is afraid of. Though I struggle explaining it, even to myself, I do believe Emma's and Will's sides of the story mirror themselves. Both families are facing the untimely death of a parent, and both families are struggling to come to terms with it, the finality of it all, in their own way. And while Miranda experiences a breakthrough, Will finally musters up the nerve to speak to Emma, while she's on her way to Aaron's hotel. They wind up spending the day together, and it's the sweetest scene of the film, if you ignore the almost-fight between Will and some guy in the bar, because said guy doesn't want to move up two seats so Emma and Will can sit in their childhood stools. They hang out at the park where they used to go when they were kids, and Will makes a big revelation to Emma: he has actually followed her around everywhere she has been since she left Pennsylvania.

Yeah, about that.

He followed her in Oregon, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and back to the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania.

The thing is, considering all of Will's issues to adapt in traditional society, it doesn't seem he has done it with malice or ill-will. The way he explains that between a day where he knows he will not see her and a day where he might see her, he'd choose the day he might see her, the possibilities of it all, could almost make sense if it didn't include unknowingly following someone halfway across a country. To him, the choice between the hard, solid no and potential yes is a no-brainer, and if it takes briefly moving to Los Angeles to potentially see Emma, he will. It's obvious he doesn't understand how she might feel about this. He doesn't see that she's understandably freaked out and, the thing is, we all would.

But at the same time, it's almost impossible to be angry at Will for, technically, stalking Emma all across the United States. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's genuinely doing it out of love and nothing else.

And that's a heartbreaking part of this film.

All the weird things Will does, saving coins Emma gave him and talking out loud to his dead parents, living in his memories of a perfect world and going where Emma goes because of the sheer possibility he might see her, he does them out of love. He doesn't act like he should be his boyfriend instead of the one she already has, nor does he become violent when her life doesn't include him. He's willing to say yes to everything she asks, even if it means never seeing her again.

Despite all of this, the love Will has for Emma is unbelievably pure.

Remember Aaron and the vases thrown across the living room?

Emma visits Aaron at his hotel and they make amends after, seemingly, both cheating on each other. We also see the flashback of a confrontation between Aaron and the unnamed guy Emma has cheated with. Said unnamed guy implies that Aaron also cheated, they physically fight, and the unnamed dude finishes his course, but most importantly, his life, killed by a coffee table.

And Aaron.

Emma is still freaked out by Will confessing he had followed her everywhere in the country, and Aaron uses this and the fact that she gives him Will's full name to cover himself up for the unnamed guy's murder. I mean, yeah, on the outside, Will seems like the perfect culprit. He's not properly adjusted to society, may have been in Los Angeles at the time of the crime, is in love with Emma, and has been following her all around the country.

So he ends up in jail, Jim bails him out, and I had never, ever heard the sentence "There is no matinee show on Thursday" carry so much pain in my life, as Will understands there was more he didn't know about his parents and his mother's health. There is something, a special talent, in channeling an inordinate amount of pain in such a normal sentence, and there is something that deeply touches me about this. Even in music, as a general rule. Having the ability to write mundane sentences, such as "There is no matinee show on Thursday," "It's a ten-minute drive to your house" or "Today I drove through the suburbs," and make them carry so much pain and emotion is a talent I admire beyond belief.

And that's what this film has, the ability to make me feel things, to hurt my heart, with just the sentence "There is no matinee show on Thursday."

And I have to admire that.

The delivery and end of Waiting For Forever feels a little rushed compared to the rest of the film, as if you had pushed the speed button on the story. The bulk of the movie spans over only a few days, and then, from the murder mystery onward, it becomes blurry. Emma stays in Pennsylvania to take care of her ill father and receives a letter from Will who tells her to call the people who drove him to their hometown because they will know he wasn't in Los Angeles on the day of the murder. By the time she has made the call and come back to the patio, her father is dead. And that hurt my heart a little too hard. Finally, she receives one last letter from Will through Jim, and the rainy scene didn't fail at reminding me of the ending of Back To The Future 2, which I guess was not the director's intention. But it did.

Will finally confesses his love to Emma, while asking her for nothing. And I don't understand why she chooses to fly to San Francisco to give him a chance, my potentially cynical heart doesn't get it, really, but it's a sweet ending to a sweet (but heartbreaking) film, and I buy it. I want to buy it.

I want to buy it because they haven't compromised the pure kind of love Will has for Emma. They don't kiss, they don't really say anything, they don't jump in each other arms. They stay close together, holding hands, quietly, while the world around them is turning, and it's their own world again, Will and Emma, and it's more touching than a grand gesture, and it's perfect, who cares about my cynicism.

I don't know if I'm ever going to watch Waiting For Forever again, because I rarely ever watch sad films more than once, I don't put myself through that much pain on my own volition, but I liked it. It isn't a romantic comedy, but it is romantic, sad, and strangely beautiful, and this time around, I liked it. The characters were likable, you wanted to root for them, and the story was engaging. It has a vibe similar to something like Benny And Joon, not a traditional rom-com. It's the kind of film that has enough magic to make you forget about all the things that would usually make you angry, and it's good enough for my hopelessly romantic heart.

Maybe I'm not that cynical and perpetually angry after all.