Hollywood's Black Magic

Listen up girls, teens, tweens, and forty-somethings who act like teens: real life is not like the movies.

News-flash, I know. Stop the presses.

I bring this inanely obvious observation up because this weekend Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman star in a charming, romantic, engaging movie about sex and love, in that order, which has about as much to say about How Things Really Are as Snooki. “No Strings Attached” follows a couple who agree to have sex for sex’s sake, with no obligation to so much as eat breakfast together.

Kutcher plays Adam, one of the hopeful but ignored drones on the set of a Hollywood TV show. His dad (Kevin Kline) basks in the enduring fame of a lead role in a long past sitcom, but Adam refuses professional help from his dad. He prefers to make it on his own. Plus, his freewheeling, drug-using, oversexed dad is kind of a jerk and who wants that?

Emma (Portman), beautiful, emotionally distant, and spunky, can match him tit for tat in foul language and x-rated ideas. While he slaves away in the bowels of Hollywood, she serves her medical residency. They’re acquaintances, nothing more.

They become much more one morning when Adam wakes up naked on her couch. Driven by frustration upon learning that his father has been seeing his girlfriend, Adam has handled the situation by a) getting so drunk he can’t remember anything and b) calling every female in his phone to see if they will have sex with him.

“When Harry Met Sally,” way back in 1989, asked if men and women could be friends without wanting to sleep together. “No Strings Attached” poses the opposite question. Can a man and a woman have frequent, casual sex without becoming friends and/or romantic partners? Adam and Emma set forth on just such an experiment and find it challenging as you might expect.

The problem with the film is not the stream of amusing but over the top vulgarities that manage to shock even this jaded critic, nor the relentless foul language, nor the pervasive drug use that’s only partly repudiated. It’s not even the sexual theme, which is rendered in graphic detail, earning the movie a R rating. Make that hard-R.

The great flaw is that you like the characters so much. Both Adam and Emma just ooze charm, beauty, and vulnerable earnestness. Both Adam and Emma have a Greek chorus of friends who chime in on their relationship. Wallace (Ludacris) and Eli (Jake Johnson) are consistent, at least, in encouraging Adam to sleep with anything that moves - although their language is more Saxon - but they do it with style and good humor that almost wins you over. Greta Gerwig, as Emma’s friend, is the same way. Lake Bell, as Adam’s sexy/awkward co-worker, almost steals the show on her own. Secondary characters make the movie work, as a movie at least.

It’s a problem that you like the characters because, as we’re assured again and again, Adam has a good heart. Emma does as well. And that’s where the breakdown happens.

Ladies, men who call random acquaintances, drunk, in the middle of the night for sex, well… they’re not the good heart type. They have issues. Issues that will leave you, months down the road, wondering what happened to your credit card and your self-esteem. For her part, Emma pulls stunts like attending a frat party the night before her father’s funeral and luring unsuspecting Adam to the funeral itself. Most of us would spend that time with our mothers and siblings, not guzzling beer in pajamas. Moreover, she continues to abandon her sister and mother, disappearing into her work without a trace.

Neither one of these characters has a good heart. They are not self-actualized. Oprah would tell them a thing or two. So would Dr. Phil, Dr. Laura, and their personal physician. They have the potential for a good heart, but need some therapy, church attendance, and soul-searching to get there.

The film creates an illusion that Adam and Emma are good people who do some crazy things, that they deserve each other and happiness. They deserve each other, yes, but in a screaming match on the sidewalk kind of way, not a ride off into the sunset kind of way.

Hollywood works magic. It can make giant, blue Na’vi ride awesome flying dinosaurs or a show-down in a zero-gravity hallway. Perhaps the more subtle magic, however, is creating a world in which anyone would look at the romance of Adam and Emma and think it’s any more linked to reality than Jersey Shore.