Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Although the trailers probably framed this as an outright comedy, it is mostly a romantic drama with most of the ha ha comedic elements at the beginning of the movie, and the comedy throughout is a little more in the black comedy vein. I think the story is helped by being written and directed by a woman.

The film is almost exactly as the title indicates. Steve Carell plays Dodge, an insurance salesman who still goes to work although an Earth-ending meteor is set to hit in three weeks time. As the days tick by the movie shows us how different people react, some keep to their routine, such as the tv anchorman continuing to professionally report on the state of the world (Mark Moses), or Dodge's cleaning lady continuing to come every week. Others, like Dodge's friends (Rob Corddry, Connie Britton, Patton Oswalt, Melanie Lynskey), live it up like there is no tomorrow.  And as we know the tomorrows are ending soon.

Dodge sees his downstairs neighbor Penny (Keira Knightley) crying when she breaks up with her boyfriend (Adam Brody). He lets her stay the night and later helps her escape during a riot. Fleeing in her car with an abandoned dog, each have a last desire--she's missed all the commercial planes flying out of the country so Dodge offers her to take her to a man he knows who has a plane, so that she can see her family one last time; he wants to track down a high school sweetheart after finding a mislaid letter where she says he was the love of her life.  We can see that for him a lot of his desire is of the "what if" he had done this or that throughout his life, and yet he is still unmotivated to act until this last moment.

It becomes a roadtrip as they meet friends and strangers and we see how they too have reacted to this end. Penny has a military friend (Derek Luke) who is hunkered down in a bomb shelter. A man who gives them a ride has a death wish (William Petersen). They stop at a family restaurant chain where all the employees have taken matters in their own hands. They also hook up with Dodge's estranged father (Martin Sheen).


Like I said the comedy mostly comes in the beginning of the movie, although there are many black and sardonic comic moments throughout and the scene in the restaurant, where the employees are all involved in orgy-like behavior, is more broadly comedic.  Each of the segments during the roadtrip offer the couple different options in how to behave in their last hours, but although some seem tempting, they both find themselves remaining true to the emotion of "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."

Its use of pop songs, which I normally hate in movies as they tend to use them as short cuts to tell you how you should be feeling, does a similar job here.  But I liked this treatment better in this film because they are apt to the defeatist situation and punctuate Dodge's equally black emotions, and rather than telling us "Dodge feels this way and you should too," we are already emotionally with Dodge's state of mind at this point.

For the most part this is a story about the development of the relationship between the two main characters. Most likely without the world ending event they would not be friends, but I found the development genuine and the two actors have good chemistry together. I think I like Steve Carell better in these sorts of comedies where he is a character suffering from a depression, like Little Miss Sunshine, rather than the more obvious comedies like the recent The Incredible Burt Wonderstone which was a pretty flat screenplay with an unlikable main character.  Keira Knightly's Penny is a undirected woman yet Dodge can see her emotional frailty, enough to put aside his own needs to serve hers, as a last gesture of friendship and love. Knightly can play both sides of the comedy/drama coin and thus the film is not heavy despite its heavy theme.  I think Seeking a Friend is worth a look.