When husbands and wives collaborate on a movie (get your mind out of the gutter) about broken relationships and tested dreams, one can't help but wonder how much of it comes from personal experience. Writer/director/actor Ryan Piers Williams tries to bring an intimate, sincere touch to his Manhattan drama, X/Y, in which he stars alongside his wife America Ferrera as a couple dealing with stagnation and insecurity. Perhaps they should have had a longer conversation over dinner about this one. Williams endeavors to tell multiple interconnected stories loosely based on the search for love in the mean streets of New York City, a genre that can pretty much write itself at this point. And judging by the multiple clichés and general lack of perspective Williams brings, that may be exactly what happened.
X/Y might have been better served sticking with a single story rather than four vignettes of varying quality and emotional heft. The first features Ferrera and Williams as Sylvia and Mark, who just had their night of coital bliss ruined by her disinterest. "I'm done" she tells him flatly, long before he's close to finishing. The ensuing argument goes everywhere we expect it to. She's lonely, he isn't always happy, she cheated on him with a co-worker (played by Common), and he packs his stuff and leaves. From there we see the film begin to split, as Mark goes to stay with his friend Jake (Jon Paul Phillips), a model recovering from a bad break-up. To get over her he has meaningless sex with a woman in a nightclub bathroom; meaningless gay sex with a friend; and then goes on a meaningless coffee date with a random girl. Let's just say his story is, well, meaningless.
Unfortunately that's how much of X/Y feels: just kind of pointless. The exception is the second short which stars the underrated Melonie Diaz (of Fruitvale Station) as Jen, a friend of Sylvia's who is also looking for love but going about it in all the wrong ways. When we first meet her she's just waking up from a random hook up; the smile crossing her face full of hope that this guy might be the one. So what does she do? She leaves her bag behind so she has a reason to return and see him again. We learn that Jen recently lost her job, and maybe that has something to do with her need for a man to take care of her, but the point is that her story is given the insightful consideration that the others simply aren't. We get a sense of her desperation but she never comes across as pathetic, and that's a testament to both the writing and Diaz's typically tremendous performance. Unfortunately, Jen's story comes to an abrupt, heavily-contrived halt and the film never comes close to recovering.
As an example of how disposable much of X/Y turns out to be, Williams throws in for kicks a laughably bad conversation between Mark, who happens to be a screenwriter, and his agent (David Harbour) about making his screenplay more studio friendly. "It needs to end in a chase scene", he says, because that sounds like something those evil studio execs would say. Actually, what an actual studio exec would say is to make sure the screenplay has a point. Whatever that point may be, just make sure it has one. X/Y never makes clear why we should care about these people and if their relationships live or die.
Rating: 2 out of 5
