With its comfortably ramshackle plotting and character archetypes, director Daryl Wein’s offbeat romantic dramedy Lola Versus is on the one hand just another fairly sharp and sparkling showcase for a bit of solid joke-writing. But with a watchability that stems chiefly from a collection of nuanced observations about human frailty rather than any lip-nibbling, cutesy set-ups, the film exists and unfolds in a realistic miasma of bewilderment and late-twentysomething confusion. It’s a serially silly movie about the serious discombobulation of change in life — the shock and fear attached to it, and the swirl of ambivalence that rushes in to fill the void of old habits and routines. And though it didn’t find welcome reception in theaters earlier this year, Lola Versus should only grow in value and reputation with time, as wider mainstream audiences become more familiar with the rising star of Greta Gerwig.
The actress stars as the title character, a New York grad student working on a dissertation about society’s discomfort with silence. When her fiancé Luke (Joel Kinnaman), a painter, nervously dissolves their engagement just weeks before their destination wedding, Lola is devastated. Her parents (Bill Pullman and Debra Winger) swoop in to help bolster her spirits, and Lola also leans on her best friends — Alice (co-writer Zoe Lister-Jones, above left), a manic singleton, and Henry (Hamish Linklater), a sensitive indie rocker whose relationship with Lola extends back to their adolescence. Over the course of the next year, as Lola cycles through some bad decision-making and various love triangles form and dissipate both inside of her social circle and outside of it, Lola tries to locate her personal compass and get it situated upwards.
It’s true that the grander narrative arcs of Lola Versus eventually devolve into a collection of discrete bits: a pregnancy scare, a hypnotherapy appointment, and a couple bits involving Nick (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a one-time sexual coupling that Lola comes to regret. But there’s a funky energy here that helps the material transcend its navel-gazing roots, even if its final resting place of self-actualization is somewhat predetermined.
Lister-Jones and director Wein previously collaborated on 2009’s Breaking Upwards, a slyly autobiographical tale of a New York couple who, battling codependency, meticulously plot out their own separation. Their off-screen lives clearly also inform the backdrop and flavorings of Lola Versus, shot through with little bohemian asides and dialogue that crackles. Lola and Alice’s patter (“Is your Match.com log-in still let-me-be-your-hole?”) capture the easy rhythms of a friendship in which niceties are not paramount, while other bits score simply as one-liners. There are also some funny gags (like Alice confusing Oxycontin with Oxytocin) that are smoothly interwoven into the scenes surrounding them.
The acting, though, is what really elevates Lola Versus, trumping a fairly meandering narrative and making it such a treat. Zoe-Lister is quite fun, and gifted with an innate sense of comedic timing. And as Lola’s liberal-minded parents, Pullman and Winger are also delightful, beautifully filling in a backstory which is only hinted at. Then there’s Gerwig, whose expressive reactions and skillfully embodied vulnerability anchors the movie. Her choices are always interesting, conveying the choppy, at-odds inner cadences of a character who tries to argue her way out of a bad decision by exclaiming, “I’m slutty, but a good person!” She makes the film both funny and a bit heartrending.
Lola Versus lacks the adventurousness and certainly the stylishness of (500) Days of Summer, but it is a sort of more femme-centric version of that, crossed with Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture. One of those movies hit it big at the box office and the latter, like Lola Versus, disappeared with the tiny “plunk!” of a small pebble tossed off a pier into the ocean. But Dunham’s star rose again with HBO’s zeitgeist smash Girls, and the incandescence of Gerwig is such that it only remains a matter of time until her mainstream breakthrough.
The film’s Blu-ray bow features a 1080p treatment of the movie, in non-anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen with a DTS-HD master audio 5.1 track and optional French and Spanish language tracks. A fun audio commentary with Wein and Lister-Jones anchors a great slate of bonus materials, which also includes a polished little “Fox Movie Channel” featurette on Gerwig, and another featurette touting her charms. The disc’s other two featurettes focus on the filmmakers and the movie’s premiere, respectively. Rounding things out are a complement of deleted scenes and amusing outtakes, in which, yes, obscenities are amply showcased. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)