Steve Carell and Keira Knightley in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
The background
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is directed by Lorene Scafaria, and stars Steve Carell, Keira Knightley, Martin Sheen and Melanie Lynskey. There’s a month till the end of the world – an asteroid is about to hit. Everybody else is going to orgies, taking heroin and committing suicide; but Dodge (Carell) plays an insurance clerk who falls for bohemian girl next door Penny (Knightley), isn’t up for that.
Cutesy last-ditch matchmaking
Knightley’s character, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph, is a “sunny-yet-neurotic life force’, with “ill-matched coats”, a scrunchy face and a set of favorite records. The film “invites a lethal dose of scepticism towards its cutesy last-ditch matchmaking,” and it’s sad to see Carell’s gifts being “misapporpriated for a project this stunted.”
It’s very irritating
Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian hated it even more, suggesting that you’d have had “handfuls of wet sand in your swimsuit less irritating than this supremely irritating romantic dramedy.” It’s like someone saw Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, “and said: ‘Yeah, mmmm, give me something like that only much, much more irritating.” Carell “looks and sounds like the world’s creepiest serial killer.”
Some spiky comedy
At least Scafaria’s showing ambition, said Anthony Quinn in The Independent. But is that “enough?” There is some “spiky comedy” in the beginning, but it “dissolves into mawkishness and thence absurdity.” Ultimately, ‘you wouldn’t want to spend the little time left with either of these two.”
I’d rather be with the hedonists
Wendy Ide in The Times said that were it to come to the end of the world, her sympathies would lie “with the ortolan-munching, opium-smoking hedonists rather than the mealy-mouthed party pooper judging them all.” Penny has some appeal, but Carell “seems barely present,” with his “performance so flat that you would get more nuance from three-week-old roadkill.”
You believe in nothing
Nigel Andrews in The Financial Times said the film was “as insufferable as its title.” It’s “one of those rare movies where you believe in absolutely nothing,” not even in the “romance/catharsis plot which works the Hollywood schmaltz stills till depp into the night.”
Still, Knightley and Carell are good company
Ian Freer on Empire was a little nicer: “Perhaps not as funny or affecting as you’d hope, but Carell and Knightley make for good company for the darkest days.”
