Definitely, Maybe Directed and written by Adam Brooks Starring Ryan Reynolds, Isla Fisher, Rachel Weisz Classification: PG
Imagine yourself a writer charged with the thankless task of dreaming up another romantic comedy. How do you vary the invariable? There are really only two choices, and the first is the hardest: Refresh the content. But this takes wit and sensitivity and, well, writerly talent. So most scribes dodge that bullet and go for the easier second choice: Fiddle with the structure. That is, devise some plot gimmick that lets you tell the same amorous yarn a different way, maybe by rearranging the order of events or, a particular favourite, by inventing ever bigger impediments to romance (he's the American President, and she's not; or, she's a Hollywood star, and he ain't). Of course, the great benefit of the fiddling option is that it takes all the pressure off your content worries - just stick in the usual pop tart and toast until gooey.
Definitely, Maybe is definitely a fiddler. For starters, it's a love story that opens with love lost, with a divorce decree. After that bit of rearranging, it flashes back in time and morphs into a boy-meets-girl yarn - or, more precisely, into a boy-meets-three-girls yarn.
Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to guess which gal became the wife, which gal should have become the wife and which gal is there just to play with our heads. It's exactly like that old shell game - mildly diverting, pea-sized and otherwise hollow.
We start in the present with Will (Ryan Reynolds) fielding those divorce papers and embarking on the mixed blessing of joint custody with his 10-year-old daughter, Maya (Abigail Breslin of Little Miss Sunshine fame). Your typically precocious cinematic tyke, Maya asks Daddy to fill her in on his past love life up to and including Mommy. So, tucking her in for the night, that's just what he does, changing the names of the three femmes to keep the kid in suspense. Cue the flashback, the guessing game and a movie that, if nothing else, is exactly what it seems to be - a romantic comedy dished out as a bedtime yarn pitched to the level of a 10-year-old.
Back to 1992, then, when a restless Will is in Wisconsin with his college sweetheart, Emily (Elizabeth Banks). Off he goes to the Big Apple for a few months in order to - get ready for this - work on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. Being young and idealistic, Will thinks Bill is a really swell guy. April doesn't, but only because she (Isla Fisher) is the apolitical artsy type with her head all immersed in the musings of some emerging tragedian called Kurt Cobain. April, naturally, is candidate No. 2. Rounding out the trio is Summer (Rachel Weisz), who is also young but not so naive. She's already cynical enough to aspire to a career in journalism, and ambitious enough to have sex with a sexagenarian (Kevin Kline in a forgettable cameo as a celebrated writer, the so-clichéd kind with a beard pickled in booze and pomposity).
Voilà the babes. And voilà Will, who, as the years tick by and cellphones shrink in size and the once-revered male Clinton loses his lustre, spends the rest of the picture as a perpetual victim of bad timing. The three women keep appearing and disappearing and reappearing in his life, and he's always falling for the wrong one at the wrong moment. Yes, his ill luck does get tedious, but, to remind us why we should still care, the script makes intermittent returns to the bedside of inquisitive little Maya, there to pump up our flagging interest with excited interjections on the order of, "And then what happened?"
Sorry, can't tell you what happened. But I can mention that the creative team here has ties to that Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones crowd, which may explain why so many of Ryan Reynolds's lines sound as if they might have been better delivered by a young Hugh Grant. Ryan tries to make them his own, but the ghost of Hugh does linger. Over on the female side of the performing ledger, someone shines far brighter than the others, but, for the sake of the plot, I should keep mum again. Let's just say an actress steals a picture that doesn't rightly belong to her. Single-handedly, she gives her character a flash of intrigue, a hint of complexity, a measure of substance, daring to dole out some content to a picture otherwise solely devoted to fiddling with the form. Silly woman.
A contemporary footnote. Since this movie starts out as a nostalgic ode to Bill Clinton, you might well wonder if its release, in the heat of the current primary race, can be construed as a full-screen ad for Hillary. Who knows, but it's bound to backfire, because everything about Definitely, Maybe just feels so yesterday - not least of all the Clintons. In which case, pardon me while I make like my op-ed betters and offer a bold piece of punditry: If this flick tops the weekend box office, expect a big bounce for Barack.