Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

What a gem of a movie! I had read nothing at all about this! Nothing! Sometimes you are just up at the right time when a movie comes on, right? We got HBO and Cinemax free for the weekend of Father’s Day, and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World was just on. Chalk this up to a Happy Accident.

The premise felt all too real to me. Is it so hard to imagine that an asteroid just might be heading towards Earth, ready to obliterate us all? What would we do with our remaining days? Hold close the people we love? Listen to the music collection hours upon hours? Gather with friends and talk about this and that, our mistakes, regrets, misfortunes, wrong-doings, and failings? Would we seek out the girl or guy that got away? Would you participate in orgies, have unprotected sex, shoot heroine, loot buildings and cause destructive chaos?

Steve Carell is an insurance salesman named Dodge learning across the radio that Earth has 21 days before an asteroid obliterates the planet. His wife literally flees from their car never to return. He learns second hand that she was having an affair. The phone lights up at work, but the boss of the company, like a lot of people, seems to have lost it. Going to work anymore seems futile because everyone will be dead in a manner of days. Carell happens to see Keira Knightley, as Penny, weeping outside his window and offers his home as a refuge for her to lament. She’s stuck in a dead end relationship with unemployed musician Adam Brody. After just sleeping on his couch for hours and hours, she finally awakens. Eventually the two part until the troublesome (and violent) looters have made their way to Carell and Knightley’s neck of the woods, inspiring the latter to convince the former to get out of Dodge (pun intended) while the going was good. She had three years worth of mail that had been put in her mailbox on accident instead of his. A letter from an old high school sweetheart inspires them to hit the road for her house so he can see her one last time. What ensues is a growing romance as the two understand the inevitable end is not far away.

The film opens with people Carell knows abandoning their inhibitions, accepting the “end of days” by getting as crazy, wild, and free as possible. Nothing matters anymore so they don’t concern themselves with proper behavior or worry about repercussions of their actions. Carell, however, just doesn’t want to waste his time acting out like the others. The road trip with Keira winds up being anything but a waste of the hours left to him. She’s a bit of an emotionally vulnerable mess.  She’s tries to develop positive relationships, but Keira is cursed with always choosing the wrong men. She feels obligated to help Carell get to Olivia (the woman of the letter), and he would, in turn, reward her with a plane trip to the UK to be with her folks. When the two fall in love with each other, their plans change.

I do think the film is ultimately about taking the time provided and making the most of it while you still can. Chance meeting results in burgeoning love that ends with the two lovebirds gazing into each other’s eyes as the asteroid levels their world (just a white light and some background noise tell us of the “big event”) may seem a bit old fashioned but because of the crazy antics of a societal (and moral) collapse there’s a little bit of a spin applied to the backdrop of the romance. For me, Knightley has never been more appealing. She’s giddy and unpredictable and wears her emotions on her face at all times. She just wants love and so does Carell. There are those silent looks the two share where silence speaks volumes at a high pitch. When you have two actors who can identify aching and longing on their face like these two actors, those shared looks carry even greater depth and meaning. Not just that, but we see the gradual love develop on their faces and in demeanor as well.

The opening of the film is perhaps the funniest with all the “Armageddon’s on the horizon, let’s party!!!” and total breakdown of conventional normalcy that exists, quite maddening as Corell somberly and soberly tries to stay unpolluted by it all. Once they leave the city and enter lesser populated areas, the film becomes quieter and more introspective, allowing the stars to enjoy each other’s company and grow closer.

There are plenty of characters that pop up in small parts. William Peterson of CSI fame has this very odd part as a man driving a truck who gives Penny and Dodge a ride, with shovels in the back seat, eventually wondering if they were the ones hired to kill him! He winds up succumbing to a hit with Carell stunned by it. Derek Luke is a former lover of Knightley’s, one of those doomsday preppers who believes some highly protected shelter and supplies kept hidden in his bunker will help him (and his boys) remain safe from the asteroid about to decimate the world. Connie Britton (of Friday Night Lights and American Horror Story) is the wife of Carell’s friend (played by Rob Corddry, completely, totally enraged, half-crazy, and unfiltered) and, for me, was just sexy as hell for whatever reason (she had that “hot mom” thing workin’). Martin Sheen pops up at the end as Frank, Dodge’s long-estranged father (he left Dodge’s mom, and had tried to keep in touch but she made it hardly possible to do so), the “man with the plane” who could take Penny home. I love this little scene where Sheen and Carell have where their characters address the past, and the humility in a father’s face and a son that just wants the hatchet not only buried but totally removed is expressed so vividly. When time is so short, why linger on the pains of the past when you can just enjoy some time together after 25 years of separation? And Adam Brody is adept at having about ten or so minutes of screen time (see Jennifer’s Body or Scream 4) and making the most of it; in this film he’s one of those self-loathing “artists” whose music has never gotten him anywhere.

But it’s all the warm moments shared by two gifted performers, Carell and Knightley, that really sets this off, and I was surprised at how touched I was with their work on screen together. The awkwardness of the aftermath of their sexual encounter, a very strange trip to a “TGIF Fridays” bar called “Friendley’s” where the staff, stoned and “very affectionate”, are verrrrrrry welcome to customers, the experience with Peterson, eating a cooked meal (Knightley prepared from the food in the kitchen) at the parents of Olivia (where Carell ably establishes his total adoration for her; the record player, especially a nice touch), and together in the car during the road trip itself. Even when they get arrested, there's a moment where the two comfort each other while in opposite prison cells. I was a bit miffed that this film wasn't a hit at all, with critics or the public. Maybe that was why the film escaped my attention until tonight...