This disappointing film, adapted by David Nicholls from his truthful, highly entertaining novel first published in 2009, covers some 16 years in the life of Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway), a working-class bluestocking educated at a Yorkshire comprehensive, and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess), a handsome upper-middle-class Wykehamist. They spend an intimate, sexually unconsummated night together after graduation from the University of Edinburgh in 1988, and subsequently they meet or correspond annually on its anniversary, the numinous St Swithin's Day, 15 July.
He's socially confident but shallow and intellectually insecure, and graduated with a 2:2 in anthropology. She's socially insecure but intellectually assured, politically alert and principled, and got a double first in English and anthropology. Dexter rises rapidly in schlock, "yoof TV" and then sinks in a sea of booze and a haze of cocaine. She drifts (amusingly for us) into a variety of odd jobs before teaching, and then finds herself as the author of children's books. We wonder what attracts a smart, wisecracking girl to such a dislikable man, but then such affairs do occur, and there are intimations that this worm is going to develop some backbone.
Reading the novel one becomes aware of the films it resembles. Like Same Time, Next Year the characters agree to meet annually while living separate lives. Like When Harry Met Sally they affect to believe that sexual intimacy is the enemy of true friendship and draw up a code of practice to support this ethic. Like The Way We Were, a couple from different backgrounds and with contrasting temperaments and sensibilities live through turbulent times, their private lives reflecting public events. Like Love Story there's an underlying threat of a cruel fate about to scupper the lives of this mismatched yet oddly yoked pair.
The novel compares more than favourably in wit, sophistication and social insight with these movies. The film version, however, is much like them: thin, superficial and sentimental. Its Danish director Lone Scherfig, who seemed confidently at home swimming in the currents of class-conscious Britain while making An Education, is here thrashing around in the un-nuanced shallow end. The casting and direction of the beautiful Anne Hathaway as the pretty, bespectacled, determined Emma, a sort of Yorkshire cross between Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy, borders on the disastrous. Her accent is all over the map. The best that can be said is that she sometimes resembles the youthful Maureen Lipman, herself from Yorkshire, at times bespectacled and possessed of fine comic timing, but who here appears to be rehearsing her repertoire of regional accents.
