Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

Film: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)
Stars: Steve Carell, Keira Knightley, William Petersen, Melanie Lynskey, Adam Brody, Connie Britton, Martin Sheen
Director: Lorene Scafaria
Oscar History: None
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

While some awards hounds spend the remaining days of the year scrounging for those last shards of Oscar films that they may have missed, I also like to focus on some of the films of the year that I was intrigued by, but just wasn't able to hit in the theaters.  The films that are sitting at the bottom of the Netflix queue because they just came out on DVD, and I want to see before I make any decisions about my personal end-of-the-year honors.  They may not make any impact, or they may make all the impact possible (one of my favorite 2011 films, Weekend, was amongst the final films I saw before making my own personal Top Ten list last year).  This thought process was what led me to Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, a film that I missed in theaters (considering the Box Office, pretty much everyone else did as well), and wanted to check out.

The film tells a tale we know fairly well at this point of a man named Dodge (Carell) dealing with a midlife crisis.  His wife has left him, his job sucks, and he goes unnoticed by his neighbors.  What complexity is added to his life is that he has the knowledge that the world will be ending in three weeks.  A seventy-mile wide asteroid is set to collide with Earth and destroy all of humanity.  As a result, everyone around him is reacting differently.  Some are finding God, others are finding Sodom and Gomorrah-there is a party where heroin, uninhibited sex, and all sorts of debauchery reign supreme, and Dodge seems to want none of it.  His friends are inexplicably trying to set him up on a date, despite it being destined to be a very short-lived relationship, and were it not for the interest of a Bohemian neighbor named Penny (Knightley), he probably would have maintained his mundane routines for the remainder of his life.  However, meeting Penny, who is desperate to reunite with her family in Britain before she dies, and becoming emboldened to meet his first love, Olivia, they set off on a road trip to cross that final item off their Bucket List before an asteroid intervenes.

(Spoilers ahead) The film, like Children of Men and Melancholia, spends a lot of time hypothesizing how a world that knows that the end is nigh, would react.  We see bulletin boards advertising not only for the title request, but also for "Assassins for Hire," or "Who Wants to Sleep with a Virgin?" (which amusingly has no phone numbers left on the tabs).  In addition to the orgy that breaks out in an exceedingly amusing scene at a restaurant called Friendsy's, we also see a beautiful line of people being baptized in the ocean.  Everyone seems to have their own thoughts on how the world should end, and Scafaria takes a pleasingly leisurely look at these different customs and denials of the end of days.

The script suffers slightly when it isn't focused on this question of what is "truly important," and instead focuses on the sporadic relationship between Carell and Knightley.  Both fine actors, and I'm not bothered by the age difference (though he often plays a goofy guy, Carell is handsome and surprisingly well-built for a man of 50), but the film seems to make quick assumptions about the two, and it's hard to believe that they so quickly fell-in-love, and that the opposites attract thing would work so well since they spent such a large portion of the film as friends rather than lovers.  When the film first came out, I remember reading somewhere (don't recall where, but if you wrote it, take credit for it), that the film needed to be better edited, and I agree-the film gets choppy about where the relationship is headed, and what the characters' focus is centered upon.

That isn't to say there aren't wonderful moments toward the end, even if the film loses the sharp commentary of its first half.  I don't recall what part of the film this comes in (somewhere toward the latter half of the middle, probably), but the scenes with Derek Luke were excellent.  Luke plays a strong, military man who also happens to be Penny's ex, who has decided rather naively that he will survive the asteroid's blast, and has built a bomb shelter to sustain he and several other men (and apparently some women to be recruited later) to start rebuilding civilization.  He's the sort of character you'd expect in the similarly themed (though far, far, far superior Children of Men)-a man determined to find a hopeful silver lining in the apocalypse.  The entire sequence with him is awkward, but not because he is jealous of Carell, but because he shows a hope that the rest of the film has given up on, even if it isn't grounded in fact.

The movie ends with neither of the characters getting what they initially sought out, but of course, both of them getting the end result of their goal.  Despite Dodge finding Olivia and Penny getting the plane to take her to Britain, they find themselves back in Dodge's hotel as the movie finishes, Dodge finally finding real love and Penny finally finding her family.  The film of course ends with a wall of white, as Penny tells the love of her life about her childhood.  It's the sort of ending that works well even if it hasn't been entirely earned, and shows that even in a film that has a sloppy middle, a great beginning and ending largely makes up for it.