Lola Versus

Lola (Greta Gerwig) just turned 29.  Although he was the one to propose, her fiance (Joel Kinnaman) suddenly has cold feet and breaks off the engagement.  Lola spends the next year trying to figure out her relationships, and maybe even herself.

She takes comfort with her girlfriend (Zoe Lister Jones, the film's writer) and best male friend (Hamish Linklater).  Lola waffles between her feelings for her male friend and her fiance, and so do the guys with Lola and the girlfriend. Lola ends up feeling she needs her own space to get to know herself better, which she comes to realize by the time she turns 30. Bill Pullman and Debra Winger play her hippie-ish and open-minded parents.

Like the character, the film is messsy and meandering. Lola is trying to write her dissertation (something about the use of silence in literature, which I guess is supposed to relate to her life, i.e. she needs calmness in her life) but the rest of the time she is undirected and I don't get any sense of her intelligence. The film mostly shows her partying with her friends and moping. The girlfriend character is horrible, I'm sure Lister-Jones thought she wrote herself some good lines but the laughs come from outrageous words coming out of her mouth rather than character comedy or the truthfulness of a girlfriend relationship. The only good thing I can say about this character is that she indeed does try to get Lola out of her funk (apparently the cure is taking her to clubs) and sticks by her. The two men also are shallowly written and acted--neither showed any traits to show why Lola would consider either one, and during the year neither of the guys seem very interested in Lola other than for shallowly realized reasons. And while this film takes place over a year's span, I don't get any sense of time passing, as all the scenes seem to take place in spring in NYC and Lola's always wearing these short skirts (I think Greta likes to show off her long legs) and if they didn't frame the story with her 29th and 30th birthdays, I would have thought the story took place over a few weeks.

Lola does not do any true introspection of her life and situation, and we don't see any character growth from the beginning of the story to the end, so her realization she needs to get to know herself is not based on any real thought. The script feels like a first draft that needs more fleshing out and better realized characters.  The film thinks it is an indie but really is just a lame romantic comedy with weak writing and old jokes, such as bad sex with weirdos. Basically is it trying to glom off Greta Gerwig's indie cred and charm, but that is not enough to carry this movie.