"There's a right way to be single, and a wrong way" say
the ads for How to be Single,
a film which arrives on Valentine's Day weekend and, shockingly, isn't about
trying to find that perfect love. While it's nice to not have another Nicholas
Sparks romance to wrestle with, pushing tired notions of what a true storybook
romance is supposed to look like, a film like How to be Single isn't much
better. Extolling the virtues of flying solo is perfectly fine and a welcome
change, but it's obvious the screenwriters, adapting the book by Liz
Tuccillo, have no idea how to do that without falling back on the clichés they
claim to be against.
Perhaps this isn't really the fault of
director Christian Ditter or the writers, but Tuccillo, who helped
present the glossiest view of Manhattan female singlehood ever with Sex and the City, and
compounded the problem with her most popular book, He's Just Not That Into You,
which became an insufferable movie a lot like How
to be Single. The film certainly has a talented cast of female stars to
navigate the dating scene with humor and what little depth of emotion they're
given to work with. Dakota Johnson plays Alice, who decides she needs a break
from her loyal boyfriend (Nicholas Braun) because she's never really been single.
It's a chance for her to find out who she really is, but immediately upon
experiencing what being single means, she hates it.
Enter Rebel Wilson as the hard-partying
Robin, who never goes home and certainly never goes home alone. She's like an
evil Jiminy Cricket guiding Alice through the worst possible decisions on the
dating scene, like sleeping with pretty much any dude who will have her. Not
that Alice does that (at first), but she does bed down with Tom (Anders Holm),
a promiscuous bartender the ladies call a "palette cleanser" after a
long-term relationship has ended. But Tom has his eyes on Lucy (Alison Brie),
one of those phony Hollywood rom-com characters who sits around and analyzes
what love is through algorithms and chemical formulas. From the moment we see
her sitting alone at the bar we know exactly where her storyline will go.
The same goes for Leslie Mann's character, Meg, Alice's hard-working
sister who desperately wants to have a baby right now. But soon after getting
pregnant through IMF, she meets the perfect guy (Jake Lacy, who stuck around
through an abortion in Obvious
Child) who is nice enough to buy her hot chocolate and Christmas trees.
Awwww shucks. 
What the film is trying to say is actually
quite admirable, that being single is an opportunity to grow and learn to love
oneself, because it's the only way to ever find true love with someone else.
Alice's attempts to love others prove to be messy, but the film doesn't
fully commit. For example, Damon Wayans Jr. plays a widowed father Alice dates,
only to have him get cold feet because of concerns for his young daughter. We
never see a single moment of their relationship; the film skips ahead three
months right at the beginning, but we're expected to care when they break up.
Why should we? The same goes for Alice and Robin's friendship, which is
nothing more than nights out partying, flings with random dudes, and...that's
it. When a wedge is driven between the two ladies it's tough to really know
what they're arguing about. It's like they're arguing about some other movie we
weren't privy to. 
Johnson and Wilson are terrific, though,
which is why it's such a shame they don't have better material. Both women have
proven more than capable of rising above films that don't really deserve them,
and in this case How to be
Single deserves to be
alone.
Rating: 2 out of 5
