Leap Year (**½)
Directed by: Anand Tucker Starring: Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, Adam Scott, John Lithgow
Seen: April 26th 2010
**½ Out of ****
When Jeremy Sloane (Scott) takes his girlfriend of four years, Anna Brady (Adams) for dinner shortly after one of Anna’s friends see him leaving a fancy jewellery store, Anna thinks that this must be it, he must be planning to propose. He does not, and on hearing this news her father Jack (Lithgow) tells Anna of an Irish custom by which the girl can ask the guy to marry her on February 29th. Lucky for Anna, Jeremy just left for Dublin for a medical conference. (Did I mention that Jeremy is a Cardiologist? Because Anna sure seems to find this important.)
The very corporate Anna decides there and then that she will travel to Dublin in order to propose to Jeremy, as she doesn’t think he ever will propose to her. En route their flight is diverted to Cardiff, Wales due to inclement weather, and Anna is stranded quite a distance from Dublin. All air traffic is delayed, ferries are closed, even taxi’s are nowhere to be found. So Anna hires a boat to get to Dublin, but the captain of the ship simply drops her off on the beach in the Dingle Peninsula when their ship is also threatened by the weather. So Anna is forced to go to a small Irish Inn, where she eventually enlists the help of the innkeeper Declan (Goode) to get her to Dublin. Declan’s car is a small and very old Renault, and through no fault of the car it doesn’t get them very far, leading to a range of travel mishaps, which might have given the filmmakers the opportunity to show us more of the beautiful Ireland, but very little is put on display. Off course something starts developing between Declan and Anna, but it is started very covertly as the two are supposed to hate each other for the first 80% of the movie.
Amy Adams’ charm barely saves the movie, and if I wasn’t such a huge fan of hers, even that might have faltered. Matthew Goode is all right as the rock-solid Irish chauffeur, with the rest of the cast a group of fringe characters there only to serve the romantic plot. The Irish humour, while funny in the situation, is nothing new at any stage. The music/soundtrack is absolutely disturbingly terrible for the first half of the movie, and it improves only marginally during the second. The effective demonising of “the other guy” also feels like a stock-standard building block included in the script, while the “big moment” (the realisation kiss) is nothing other than forced into the story by yet another benchmark Irish character. The ending? Do not get me started on the ending, this is cheese-grater material of the worst kind – the characters actually have to go outside for the glorious (a word I use liberally) sunset ending. The one thought that the movie does leave you with makes you think for a moment what really matters to you in life – if your house is burning down, and you have 60 seconds to save what you can, what would you take? So there you have it, if you’re going to be a hopeful romantic and see it anyway, at least you’ll get something out of it…
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