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Take it from someone who spent two years dating—and then married to—a guy who lived in a different country: long-distance relationships are tough. It’s hard to be away from the person you love, maintaining your relationship through emails and phone calls while your friends get to go on real dates. In fact, you could say that long-distance relationships are about as awkward as the long-distance romcom Going the Distance.
Erin (Drew Barrymore) is working as an intern for a newspaper in New York when she meets Garrett (Justin Long). He’s fresh out of a relationship, and she’s going back to California in six weeks, so they agree to keep things light and easy between them. After six weeks together, though, neither one wants to call it quits—so they decide to give the long-distance thing a shot.
Erin and Garrett try to keep their cross-continental relationship afloat through texts, phone calls, and the occasional weekend visit, but they quickly discover that it’s easier said than done. As they struggle with jealousy and temptation, both continue their search for a job that will bring them closer together while their frustrations begin to tear them apart.
Like any good relationship (long-distance or otherwise), the film has its best moments when Erin and Garrett are together—when they’re laughing over dinner or walking hand in hand down the beach. Even the less-than-romantic moments—when the two are fighting—help to develop the characters and their relationship. And whatever the current status of their real-life on-again, off-again relationship, Barrymore and Long are strangely adorable together. Unfortunately, though, their moments of on-screen togetherness are few and far between, and they’re often rushed—or even compressed down to short montages.
The rest of the film, then, focuses on those uncomfortable in-between times: the frequent texts, the late-night phone calls, and the agonizing discussions with friends about where the relationship is going. There are a few entertaining moments—thanks to Garrett’s strange friends, Dan and Box (Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis), and Erin’s over-protective older sister, Corinne (Christina Applegate)—but it’s really no surprise that the pace drags when the two are apart. It’s tough to maintain a relationship over the phone, but it might be even tougher to maintain a romantic comedy using little more than phone calls and text messages—because it results in a relationship that feels cold and distant.
To keep things interesting, director Nanette Burstein (American Teen) tried to give the story an outrageous edge, overshadowing the film’s more honest and genuine moments with scenes of drunkenness, drug use, and gratuitous nudity. Garrett’s friends discuss masturbation while wandering the streets of New York, and typically prim and uptight Corinne discusses the joys of dry-humping over cocktails. Though some of the film’s more outrageous moments are truly funny, the rest feel awkward and unnatural and completely out of place.
Since I’ve survived my own long-distance relationship, I was eager to see Burstein and Barrymore offer their own chick flick take on the subject. But while Going the Distance does have its share of entertaining moments, there’s no need to go out of your way to see it.
Blu-ray Review:
After working my way through the special features menu of the Going the Distance Blu-ray release, I almost feel bad about criticizing the movie—because director Nanette Burstein seems like a sweet person, and it’s just so easy to see what went wrong with her first narrative feature.
The film’s extras include a music video of The Boxer Rebellion’s “If You Run,” along with an additional short feature that goes behind the scenes of the film’s soundtrack with the members of The Boxer Rebellion. In fact, the music features are some of the release’s most interesting extras—since many of the others seem to exist just to show the cast being silly. In How to Have a Perfect Date, they offer their (rarely serious) dating advice. In A Guide to Long Distance Dating, they offer their own (slightly more serious) thoughts on dating long-distance—a topic that, as actors who are constantly on location for work, they know a thing or two about. There are also eight deleted/alternate scenes (with more of Justin Long’s butt, in case you didn’t get enough during the movie), as well as The Cast of Going the Distance: Off the Cuff, which shows the cast members improvising their way through all kinds of awkward comedy.
With the help of these eye-opening extras, I was able to formulate a new theory about the film: Burstein simply didn’t control it enough. Since she’s used to working without a script as a documentary filmmaker, she simply let her cast run wild. Unfortunately, though, letting a real-life subject express his or her feelings to the camera isn’t the same as letting an actor improvise—and, all too often, you end up with unnatural dialogue and awkward situations (as was the case with here). That doesn’t necessarily make Burstein a bad director. In fact, her awkward but informative audio commentary shows her to be thoughtful and hard-working. It just means that, as a narrative filmmaker, she needs to learn to take a little more control of her cast. I just hope she’ll learn to take the reins more on her next film.
