Mystery screenings at a film festival are always an interesting thing. You have a wish list of the films you hope it is and another list of films you hope it is not. People in line hear whispers and rumors about what it is, and you try not to get your hopes up. I think to the collective surprise of everyone in the theater the mystery screening at this year’s Austin Film Festival was Irish romantic comedy Standby. This is a film that appeared on neither of my lists, as I had never heard of it before. And, for the life of me, I do not know why the festival, known as “the writers festival”, would select one of the most formulaic romantic comedies I have seen in quite some time as their marquee mystery screening. It was almost shocking how formulaic it was.
Alan (Brian Gleeson) works at the tourism kiosk at the Dublin airport. His life is in a bit of a rut. He lives with his dad. His skiffle band is struggling. His love life is pretty shot to shit, and he is not willing to step back into the game (having been left at the altar). One day, an American woman (Jessica Paré) Alan had an intense summer fling with eight years earlier comes through the airport on her way back to New York. The two reconnect and agree to spend the night together on the town before her flight the next morning. You can see where this is going, right?
You see, the two were going to get married for green card purposes, and Alan got scared. He scurried off back to Dublin without a word. But if you think those feelings have died out, you have never seen a movie before. Over the course of the night, they drink, they dance, they talk, they fight, they lie, they smoke pot, they play some skiffle music, and get into a couple of wacky situations. And none of their adventures are particularly fun or interesting.
I could forgive the formula of it somewhat if it was funny, but it is not. At all. Well, I think I chuckled once or twice. Brian Gleeson tries his best to be affable, but it comes off very false, making none of the jokes he has land. Jessica Paré is slightly more charming, and she was the only thing I was able to hold onto in the film. She pulls this up from the worst of the worst. The banter between the two is not crackly. Actually, it is far less banter than him making “jokes” and her laughing at them. It is a fairly stale dynamic. For us to believe the romance, the two leads have to be able to convince us their connection is real. Here, that does not even cross our mind.
A film of this nature is, of course, very episodic. We have the poker night set piece. We have the house party set piece. We have the night club set piece. We have the wedding party set piece. You know where all of these various set pieces are going, so you’re just waiting for the next one to start up. Hit repeat about sixteen times, and there’s the movie. Because of the repetitive nature, I certainly made a good friend with my watch during the ninety minutes in the theater.
The film opens with Alan and his band playing at a bar. If a film opens that way, typically, the music will play a large part in the story and these two characters’ bonds. However, it doesn’t really. Yes, they perform together late into the film, but the talk of their musical background is almost completely absent. Until she starts singing, even though we’ve never been given the information she can. Instead, we get a cheap, sentimental scene of a song performance.
There is very little to say about this film. It is a romantic comedy, and it does nothing to distance itself from all of the negative connotations that genre brings up. It is not a particularly terrible movie, but it is unmemorable. A couple of days after seeing this, I am already forgetting most of what happened in it. The romantic comedy is a genre that can produce some truly hilarious, honest films, and this feels as cloying as it can get. The complaints everyone has had with rom-coms in the last twenty-five years are present. Directors Rob and Ronan Burke play it as earnestly as they can, and it backfires. Can we just get a rom-com that tries some different things? Is that too much to ask for?
