Going The Distance

At least the girls get to swear. Documentarian Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture, American Teen) jumps into romantic comedy with this occasionally lively and frequently clumsy chick flick featuring real life couple Drew Barrymore and Justin Long as long distance romantics. Erin (Barrymore) is an aspiring journalist with six weeks left on her internship at The New York Sentinel when she hooks up with perfect guy Garrett (Long), a record executive with commitment issues. Sparks dutifully fly but she, alas, is headed for California to finish Grad School and he’s in no position to quit the day job.
They muddle through regardless, by email, by telephone and through the odd keenly anticipated visit. Can their love possibly survive all this trekking about?
We won’t know until we’ve heard from her neat freak sister (Christina Applegate) and his bromance-suitable pals. In common with much of this genre, Going the Distance offers men who can’t stop yapping about ‘relationship status’ to one another, an achingly familiar plot and a series of comedic obstacles. Still, hackneyed devices aside, the film is perfectly capable of an unusual degree of realism for its genre; the dialogue, which veers from the witty to the banal, wears the hallmarks of improvisation; the cinematography is deftly unobtrusive.
For all the nice dressing, however, we could not claim that Going the Distance was worth going any great distance to see.