Cinema: Review - Anne Hathaway in One Day
Published: 25 August, 2011
by DAN CARRIER
Rating: 4 Out Of 5 Stars
THEY have quickly become two characters who mark a literary era, their lives played out in the pages of a book that has stormed a generation, either being loved or hated.
So it was with a sense of both expectation and trepidation that I watched this film adaptation of David Nicholls’s smash hit book One Day.
It’s seriously annoying when you read a book and then watch it getting horribly turned over and upside down by a film-maker. Thankfully, this is very faithful to the novel.
We meet Emma and Dexter on the day of their graduation at Edinburgh University in 1988.
It happens to be July 15, St Swithin’s Day, and writer Nicholls uses this date as a motif to track the lives of these two friends as they wander through their 20s and meander into middle age.
Drawing on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Nicholls has created a story that considers the situations life creates and how the emotions dictate how you deal with them.
It is a good film, though I suspect if you see it without reading the book it won’t be as satisfying.
However, if you have read the book – and it has sold well over a million copies so there are clearly fans out there – watching this screen version will bring the two characters to life in a satisfying way.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Nicholls at England’s Lane Books a few weeks ago and he was insistent beforehand that I told the audience who had come to hear him that there must be no plot spoilers: let me simply say to those who have read the book, things pan out as you would expect, and, to those who haven’t, the plot twists are good and make this a satisfying tale.
But it’s not the humdinger incidents that occur that make this film good, it is essentially Nicholls’s retelling of one of Hardy’s greatest novels, updating it to give us an insight into two lives that are typical of a generation who grew up under Thatcher, were in their starry-eyed 20s when Blair was elected, and then had the benefit of 20 years of friendship to fall back on when the late 30s kicked in.
This film leaves out a few minor asides to make it a manageable length, and Anne Hathaway’s accent wobbles occasionally (is she Yorkshire? Is she London? Is she mid-Atlantic? Yes to all, and then sometime she’s none).
However, she certainly looks the part and makes a solid Emma Morley, while Jim Sturgess is super as Dexter.
I almost threw the book out of the window by page 60, railing at the crassness, stupidity, pretentiousness and stereotypes of the leads.
But the colleague who recommended it to me made me stick with it, and I was very pleased I did.
Trying to work out what it was about the book I loved was hard. It’s not the prose and language, as its content isn’t lyrical.
The story is disastrous for your sense of wellbeing and it takes a long, long time to warm to the characters. Perhaps it is the way Nicholls has captured the experience of a generation.
I know found myself recognising people who are very much like Dex and Emma, and in so many ways Nicholls’s story succeeds because it simply rings true – and if truth isn’t beautiful, then what is?