This post is a bit of a cheat since this movie isn’t out until sometime next week, but I just have to bring this movie back up because I really feel it didn’t get the love it should have by the movie going audience. Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg turned in mesmerizing performance, more so Rashida as she is the lynch pin of the film, in a romantic drama that honestly is one of the more accurate and earnest romance movies out there. It isn’t so much a lovely dovey film, but rather a movie that tries to depict the struggles of moving on, of course while some indie music plays and Jones radiates on screen with her loveable personality. Sigh, much like Beginners, I really hold this to be a perfect little romance movie.
Originally when I wrote about this movie back in September, I was apprehensive in seeing the movie because of its general indie leaning that would somehow overshadow the tightly paced story with too much precociousness and hipsterisms. Maybe I am biased, but I have been burned by too many of these movie because there effort to make the females these Zooey clones and having the guys be so overt eccentric makes the movie come off trying too hard than they should. Celeste and Jesse lets the natural abilities of their actors propel the story and their tribulations in such a flowing way that I started to fall in love with the characters, particularly Rashida since I just adore her.
The story is really where we get something different and touching than the usual love fairs we see on screen. The movie places the story right in the middle of the couples divorce and their struggle to just remain friends with one another after starting out as friends and then being married to one another. Their falling out brings to light a lot of their underlying hang ups and concerns, often struggling to cope with the fact that the other is moving on when the other isn’t progressing how they should. It makes this movie a bit more personal in my eyes since I have been in a similar situation myself, not the marriage part though. It has a familiarity to it that I think people will connect with a bit more and helps makes the heart ache you see on screen relate to the audience a bit more than most movies.
So hopefully this post and the review below of the movie will help you keep this in the back of your mind when it is released in the next week or so. I was surprised and pleased with this movie a lot more than I thought I would and hope that people will give it a watch. It was a big, underrated movie this past 2012 and people should discover how incredible Rashida and Samberg are in this movie.
At times the film waivers between drama and comedy, often finding humor in the worst times of the characters lives, but Celeste and Jesse Forever finds that beautiful give and take with the story that is ultimately about Celeste and her personal struggles. Rashida Jones is truly captivating, the approachable beauty in a film that allows us to connect with her struggles as she deals with the harsh, raw reality of living without that safe, co-dependent bubble she had with Jesse. It rubs her the wrong way in seeing that Jesse’s life is together and she is the one reeling from the revelations. At times we love her characters, as Jones is truly a gifted actress and able to pull out emotional nuance from character. There are other times when we want to hate her Celeste, not because she does terrible things, but because her flaws have a certain honest ring of truth that comes out during arguments between the title characters.
Original review here
