The Rebound (**)
Directed by: Bart Freundlich Starring: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Justin Bartha, Art Garfunkel
Seen: January 5th 2010
** Out of ****
The Rebound is a strange little story, unsure of what it really wants to be. Yes, mostly it’s a romantic comedy, but at times it gets slightly too serious to be taken as a comedy, and at other times a bit too, well, gross (more mentally than visually) to really carry the label romantic. Maybe in the sense of a life of romanticism – as one character is persuaded to go travel the world and experience life and different cultures and simply being – I can see the romanticism, but the romance part of this comedy was only really apparent and real in two short scenes during the movie. The rest of it just ran with the script.
After a particularly nasty surprise while watching home videos of her children’s birthday party, Sandy (Zeta-Jones) is now a single mom headed to New York to get away from her husband. She moves into an apartment above a coffee shop where Aram Finkelstein (Bartha), a 25 year old student, works. His parents want more for him, as he is graduated, but he does not exhibit a lot of ambition at this stage. When one of Sandy’s friends arranges a date for her, she asks Aram to babysit, and he quickly builds up quite a bond with the kids while Sandy is having possibly the worst date ever. The date is so bad in fact, that it stretches the belief of the viewer further than most science fiction films do. Why would anyone put up with this for even ten minutes, let alone the entire evening (this includes the mental gross mentioned earlier).
Back home Sandy starts taking off her clothes in the kitchen before Aram can sneak out the door in the hope that she doesn’t see him, but when she directly addresses him they start a conversation which eventually (not on the same night however) leads to a relationship between the two. Everything seems perfect and the couple lasts through quite a lot of criticism from Sandy’s friends and colleagues, with the two even living together. But then Sandy falls pregnant, and even though Aram supports her, Sandy breaks things off because of some deeper reasons I will not elaborate on in this review. This is rather close to the ending of the film, and the two do not, as is usual for romantic comedies, get back together to glorious music and a movie kiss, but much more subtly.
The Rebound feels forced in many instances, Sandy’s friends being rather awful human beings for part of it, and Aram having surprisingly little friends (none in the movie, in fact). The humour is occasionally quite crass, and the language is not what you would expect from a romantic comedy, but rather from something like American Pie. The romantic pay-off in itself is not satisfying, as only two short moments bring across true feeling, and they do not last long.
When Aram does go to see the world the movie presents us with a collage-scene of his travels accompanied by music composed by Clint Mansell, of all people (he who composed the scores for Requiem for a Dream, Pi, The Fountain and The Wrestler, among others), which is glorious. Any person who does not want to immediately pack up and travel the globe has no heart and no interest in anything outside his own home. That three to four minutes is what saved The Rebound, but has very little to do with the actual story. So for this one I’d recommend waiting for the video if you really want to see it...
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