'TIL THERE WAS YOU
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Paramount) Starring: Jeanne Tripplehorn, Dylan McDermott, Sarah Jessica Parker, Craig Bierko, Nina Foch, Jennifer Aniston. Screenplay: Winnie Holzman. Producers: Penney Finkelman Cox, Tom Rosenberg, Alan Poul. Director: Scott Winant. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 110 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
As the opening minutes of 'TIL THERE WAS YOU unfolded, I was fully prepared to despise it for continuing the SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE-ization of the romantic comedy genre. The success of Nora Ephron's 1993 paean to celestially-destined love may be the worst thing ever to happen to film romance -- what incentive is there to create a plot or characters which make sense if you can explain everything away as "fate?" Then it became clear that 'TIL THERE WAS YOU wasn't falling into the SLEEPLESS trap. In fact, it was consciously subverting it. And suddenly I was even more depressed that the film I was watching was so painfully tedious. Here was the love story I had been waiting for, and it turned out to be an uninvolving, maudlin and incoherent mess.
'TIL THERE WAS YOU follows the parallel lives of two Los Angeles residents whose lives paths first cross when they are children, and whose lives continue to affect each other's through the years though they never actually have met. Gwen Moss (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is a professional ghost writer raised on romanticized notions of meeting your soul-mate; Nick Dawkan (Dylan McDermott) is an architect whose unstable childhood has led him to a series of ill-fated affairs. Their lives become truly intertwined when Gwen signs on to ghost-write the biography of Francesca Lansfield (Sarah Jessica Paker), a former child star who subsequently begins a romantic relationship with Nick. Nick's firm is also involved in the planned demolition of Gwen's apartment building, and Gwen's impassioned opposition begins a process which could eventually bring them together.
I'm sure that director Scott Winant and writer Winnie Holzman thought they were on to something fairly clever when they came up to the concept for 'TIL THERE WAS YOU, and in theory they were right. The story of Gwen and Nick isn't a story about people destined to be together, though the structure toys with that notion as they repeatedly just miss meeting each other. This is the story of two people who still have a lot of growing up to do when we first meet them -- Gwen is a passive idealist in search of her own voice, and Nick is incapable of investing himself in anything for the long haul. What we watch over the course of twenty years of their lives are the events which shape them into people who could live happily ever after. It's a wonderfully practical kind of romanticism 'TIL THERE WAS YOU offers: the idea that true love is the product of two people who meet at a moment when they are both _ready_ for true love.
That's the sturdy skeleton of the story, however, not the dead body of a film which was made with it. Winant and Holzman are both alums of "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life," shows as beloved for their detailed characterizations as they were loathed for self-involved emotionalism. 'TIL THERE WAS YOU is all the things the detractors of those shows most detested, without nearly enough of the balancing wit and attention to detail which gave the shows such a devoted following. Holzman gets some comic mileage out of Gwen's losing battle with the eccentric design of a trendy restaurant (created by Nick, of course), but that's one of the few effective comic situations in the film. The two hours of 'TIL THERE WAS YOU could inspire a lot of watch-checking as it becomes a rambling parade of over-wrought situations and annoying characters, with Gwen's picturesque apartment complex -- a cross between Melrose Place and the Garden District where it is perpetually raining rose petals -- becoming more of a recurring joke than a location.
The fatal flaw comes with the casting of the romantic leads, and for once the problem isn't that they don't belong together. You're just not likely to care one way or the other. Jeanne Tripplehorn demonstrates a nice flair for light comedy, but the pleasant-if-kooky character she plays isn't nearly interesting enough to support the story. That goes double for Dylan McDermott's Nick, who is as difficult to watch as he is to be involved with. Nick is a complete blank for most of the film, and his sudden conversion from sullen architectural Dadaist to lover of all things poetic and ornate makes virtually no sense. Thank heaven Sarah Jessica Parker is on hand as the endearingly narcissistic Francesca, providing a burst of energy whenever she's in a scene. 'TIL THERE WAS YOU needs much more of that energy to match its good intentions, instead of 110 minutes of nearly oppressive sincerity. The struggles of real-life relationships don't have to be this dreary, but when they are, the appeal of starry-eyed hokum like SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE suddenly makes a lot more sense.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 fated attractions: 3.
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