On paper Going the Distance is a romantic comedy, but it is one of the most depressing movies I have seen all year. Should we commend a film for succinctly summing up everything that is off-course about a generation of American youth if the movie achieves it completely against its own intention? In the movie, Garrett (Justin Long) is a 30-year-old adolescent who is decidedly uncommitted to, well, his entire life, but the movie focuses on his laissez faire attitude towards relationships. He meets Erin (Drew Barrymore), a master Centipede player, who shares Garrett’s Peter Pan disposition. The two get drunk, sleep together, and then admit they have no interest in starting a serious relationship, as Erin is leaving New York for San Francisco in a few weeks. But during that time, Garret and Erin continue to get drunk, sleep together, and make each other laugh, so that by the time of Erin’s departure, they have decided to give a long-distance relationship a try.
Erin and Garrett’s relationship is unbearably banal, comprised of flirtatious quips, cynical asides, supposedly funny one-liners, and a shocking denseness. They are less a couple than they are two like-minded narcissists caught in each other’s orbits. As they get more “serious” about their relationship, they run into obstacles. One is the struggle to balance the trajectories of their individual lives with their desire to be together. The second is the vision of marriage as suffering drudgery offered up by Erin’s sister Corinne (appropriately played by Married With Children vet Christina Applegate). Sacrifice their self interest in order to careen down a road towards suffocating suburban normalcy? It hardly seems worth staying together. But Erin and Garrett enjoy each other’s cutesy comforts (and genitals) enough to fight to make their thing work.
The whole affair is nauseatingly sentimental, unsurprising considering the fact that at Garrett and Erin’s emotional depth, sentimentality is a profound experience. The only thing that even remotely helps save this sludge from sucking you under is the occasionally funny presence of Charlie Day as Garrett’s friend Dan. Sure the extended scene of listening to Dan blabber about love as he sits on the toilet is crass and crude, emblematic of the kinds of ideas filmmakers have in a world where the boundaries of discretion have eroded away allowing imagination-less hacks to do what ever they want. But the potty humor at least feels honest in the context of a film that stinks with the sweetness of air freshener.
