The F-Word
Opens Friday at Fifth Avenue and Scotiabank
Frankly, I’m rooting for Daniel Radcliffe to someday shed his Harry Potter cloak and plant his foot firmly in adult roles. But his character in The F Word is so cloying, so gratingly ingratiating, that I wanted to blast him back to Hogwarts.
The most likable character in Michael Dowse’s film is the city of Toronto, playing itself, as a bustling, 24/7, multicultural city of — surprisingly — romance. In this metropole are Chantry (Zoe Kazan), an animator, and English ex-pat Wallace (Radcliffe), who isn’t much of anything. He enjoys staring at the CN Tower from the rooftop of his sister’s house, where he sleeps in the attic bedroom.
They meet cute at a party given by Wallace’s college roommate Allan (Adam Driver) and do some pseudo-insightful fridge-magnet poetry. Wallace has spent more than a year mourning his ex; Chantry is really clear about the fact that she has a serious boyfriend. Like, live together, five years serious.
The two shake hands and decide to be friends, “like a business transaction,” notes Wallace, who spends the next few months trying to figure out how to shake the F-word and get Chantry into his attic bedroom. They eat at diners, they go dress shopping, and when Chantry’s boyfriend Ben (Rafe Spall) gets a promotion accompanied by a six-month stint in Dublin, they drink away their shared loneliness.
And they talk. They talk a lot. For some reason a lot of the talk is poop-centric. But they only occasionally talk about stuff that matters, because “you never see Bruce Willis sharing his feelings,” according to Wallace. One thing is certain: Bruce Willis never cried this much.
It’s clear that they totally get each other, though Chantry refuses to admit it. “Love is dirty, baby. Sometimes it’s downright filthy,” says Allan’s girlfriend Nicole (Vancouver’s Mackenzie Davis), who advocates laying all those pent-up feelings on the line. She and Allan are the wacky (and horny) extroverts to Chantry and Wallace’s more tentative brand of courtship.
Untimely love is not a new conceit and nothing particularly original is brought to the table here. Maybe it’s a generational romantic-comedy thing: Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan certainly did a lot of talking in When Harry Met Sally, but somehow that was less irritating. Sure, it took them over a decade to get together but at least decisions were made in the interim; poor Wallace has no such gumption.
It’s not the supporting performances that are the problem: Spall as Ben is game enough to be pushed out of a window and take jalapeno juice in the eye; Driver owns the weird things said by his character. And though Kazan’s kewpie doll mug gets her through some saccharine scenes, Radcliffe is completely out of his element as a romantic lead. It’s difficult to stay interested when our lead characters seem tired of their own game.
