Leap Year Review

Posted by Shawn S. Lealos on 01.08.2010

The first rom-com of the year has arrived but is it worth letting your girl drag you to see?

Directed by Anand Tucker
Written by Deborah Kaplan
Written by Harry Elfont
Cinematography by Newton Thomas Sigel
Music Composed by Randy Edelman

Cast
Amy Adams ... Anna
Matthew Goode ... Declan
Adam Scott ... Jeremy
John Lithgow ... Jack
Kaitlan Olson ... Libby

Runtime: 97 min.
MPAA: Rated PG for sensuality and language
Official Website




I can’t understand how my wife can talk about how much she likes Leap Year while I sat there the entire time looking around wondering if anyone else was thinking what I was thinking, mainly how much time was left before I could escape. This movie is not made for men. It wants more than anything to be a screwball comedy but never even attempts to reach the levels of the great films that came before. There are many things wrong with this movie, let me count the ways.

Leap Year tells the story of a successful working woman played by Amy Adams. Her job is to take upper class apartments and furnish them before the realtor starts shopping them. She is very good at her job and once the apartment is sold, she returns and removes all the furnishings. Her opinion is she is selling people a dream. She is also a dominating woman who believes that her strong will is enough to get her anything she wants. When her boyfriend fails to propose to her on the night she believes it is coming, she becomes depressed. Her absentee father (John Lithgow) pops back into her life after a lengthy absence and recounts how her grandmother proposed to her grandfather on Feb. 29 in a Leap Year, an old Irish tradition. She sets off to Dublin, where her boyfriend is on a business trip, with the intentions of proposing to him on Leap Year.

So far, so good, and the movie takes a nice turn when her plane is forced to land due to bad weather and she is stuck in a small town with only two days to get to Dublin in order to meet her deadline. Here she meets Declan, a pub owner played by Matthew Goode (Watchmen), and he convinces her to allow him to drive her to Dublin in exchange for money, helping him pay an overdue loan threatening his pub. Wackiness ensues.

This is all a nice set up for a chick flick except for the fact it is directed by Anand Tucker. This is one of the poorest directed movies I have seen in a long time, almost comparable to the direction skills of one Dr. Uwe Boll. Shooting a romantic comedy should be easy but Tucker seems to be trying too much here and none of it works. His camera positioning is weird, the choices of POV shots during dialogue conversations breaking every rule in the book. I can’t understand why he chooses to throw the audience off like he does with poor angles. There are also scenes during a bar fight and a wedding reception that he chooses to use a handheld, shaky cam, making no sense at all for this specific genre. My wife mentions the awkwardness of the situation and compares it to how Takashi Miike shot Audition, but Tucker is not Miike and it is one thing to use a cinematic device to help tell the story and another to just copy a previous effort. This device does not help tell the story, only detracting from the performances.

The stars should be enough to carry this movie to acceptable heights, and I assume their performances are what sold the movie to my wife. However, I cannot get behind Amy Adams character at all. Anna is a domineering bitch, a woman who always feels she should get her way, and I can’t get behind her plight at all. She demands a seat on a plane even though storms have grounded all flights. She makes disparaging comments about the country of Wales because they won’t allow travel by ship due to torrential rains. She is responsible for blowing out the power of an entire town and acts angry that her phone was shorted out because of it. I understand they are going for the powerful woman, determined to get what she wants, but the character is painted too broadly for my tastes and has too many flaws to be an effective leading lady.

Matthew Goode, on the other hand, comes out of this movie unscathed, proving he might be ready to step into the spotlight as a leading man. With head turning performances in both Watchmen and the prestige picture A Single Man, and a performance that actually makes parts of this movie interesting, he is someone I am interested in following from this point on. He is funny, but never off putting. His Declan is a perfect foil for the type of character Adams is asked to portray but, unlike Adams, he pulls it off. His character reminds me of a Harry Connick Jr. role and that brings me to a strong comparison for this movie.

One of the worst movies of 2009 was a romantic comedy called New in Town, a fish out of water story about a strong willed businesswoman going to a small working class town to streamline a factory there. When she arrives she meets the union rep, a strong willed good old boy named Ted and the two immediately become foils. The movie shares a strong plotline to Leap Year, a movie where Anna ends up in the backwoods of Ireland and ends up face-to-face with the exact same character type of a good old boy. The two movies both fail, but on completely different levels. While Renée Zellweger completely sells me on her “bitch on a mission”, Adams never is able to pull off this against type role. I love Adams but this is not the type of character I enjoy watching her portray. She can be single-minded and it can be endearing (Enchanted) but she is not able to pull off cruel and selfish, which she is here. Both New in Town and Leap Year have great supporting casts with the old men in the pub, cracking the same jokes over and over, just as fun as the factory workers cracking jokes behind the new girl’s back. However, there is one area that makes Leap Year a slightly better recommendation that New in Town, the script.

I am as surprised as anyone that I am giving credit to the writing team responsible for A Very Brady Sequel, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas and Surviving Christmas. While this movie is as generic and boring as other romantic comedies, there are moments in the script that are very smart. It is a small hint at what people originally expected from the team behind the excellent Can’t Hardly Wait before spiraling into generic obscurity. It is all in the small touches that this movie rises above the trash heap. It remains bad, but shows promise.

Some of the moments to look for if you are dragged to see this by your significant other are the following. There is a conversation between Declan and Anna about what she would grab if her apartment was on fire and she only had sixty seconds to save something. She never answers him but it is all a great setup for a moment in the final minutes of the film when she determines to use this question to test her views and values. You may question why they would hire John Lithgow to play a character that only appears in one scene and for less than five minutes of the film’s running time. He delivers a performance here that helps set up why Anna is the way she is and it works better than if she had just told the story of her dad later in the film. Finally, her occupation is important because Declan calls her a con-artist, which she denies, but by the end of the film the shoe is on the other foot. These are all great moments in the script but do nothing but prove the movie should have been much better than it turned out. That might make this movie even worse because a solid idea with some smart moments is crippled by the direction.

The highlight of the entire film is the cinematography by Newton Thomas Sigel. While the direction is atrocious, Sigel made good use of Ireland and delivers some of the most breathtakingly beautiful scenery you will see in a film this year. I might argue that any Joe with a camera can point and deliver beautiful shots while dealing with Ireland’s countryside, but Sigel knows what he is doing and gives us shots that prove he is better than the direction would indicate. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the worst part of the film is the score by Randy Edelman. The music is horridly out of place in this film. There are many moments where he gives us traditional screwball music but, instead of showcasing the scene, it takes away from the effectiveness of the performances. This is not a surprise coming from the man who scored Balls of Fury and Son of the Mask but the guy is completely overmatched in this movie. It is once again a case of the filmmakers trying to force this movie to be something it is not. This movie is a romantic comedy and, even in that genre, it fails.

The 411: Leap Year is a huge disappointment, even for a romantic comedy. A script with potential and two great leading actors in Amy Adams and Matthew Goode are wasted by incompetent directing. The beautiful scenery of Ireland is pretty to look at but the rest of the camera work is atrocious and out of place. The music and direction make this effort a labor to sit through for anyone with a Y-chromosome. The sappy ending may make many girls’ eyes gloss over but, guys be warned, you might be better off looking elsewhere for your weekend entertainment.

Final Score:  4.0   [ Poor ]