Film #39: Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World

Perhaps the best summation of Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World occurs in the very first lines of the script itself. A radio news announcer sombrely announces that the last hopes for humanity have been dashed and the 70 mile wide asteroid Matilda is scheduled to collide with the Earth in 21 days, obliterating all life on the planet. The announcer then promises that he will be back with regular updates and “aaaaaaaall your classic rock favourites”.

The drama isn’t funny and the joke isn’t dramatic but they sit besides each other without much transition between the two. It was the best of times and the worst of times, indeed.

That’s pretty much the core dynamic of Seeking A Friend, a film that is sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama but never the dramedy to which I suspect it aspires. Whether or not you think that is a problem really comes down to how willing you are to accept the sudden jerks from one tone to another and then back again.

To be fair to Scafaria (who also wrote the screenplay), she’s got her work cut out for her on the comedy side of things. The end of all life on the planet is not usually considered a laughing matter and, while apocalypse comedies do indeed exist they usually offer at least some hope for survival in some form for the protagonists. Seeking A Friend makes it very clear that this is just not an option.

Against the backdrop of the end of days, Seeking A Friend focuses on Steve Carrell’s everyman character Dodge (because he’s always avoided life, geddit?) whose wife abruptly leaves him when the upcoming human extinction is announced. Content to spend the rest of his life in soul-crushing despair, he is jolted into action when his upstairs neighbour Penny (played by Keira Knightley) confesses she has been holding on to some of his mis-delivered mail – including a letter from his high school girlfriend professing him to be the love of her life.

Dodge and Penny strike a deal, she will drive him to his former lover’s home if he arranges a charter flight to take her back to see her family before the world ends (presumably in the UK). From there, the film switches up genres and becomes a road movie for its second and third acts.

Road movies being episodic in nature, the changeover actually helps address the dichotomy between the comedy and drama and the film moves much more smoothly as a result. It doesn’t hurt that this is Scafaria’s native ground (she also wrote the screenplay for Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which is also basically a road movie).

Nearly every minor role is a cameo by
an actor you've seen in something else

Ultimately, though, there can apparently be only one winner and, I’m sorry to say but the drama side wins out by a considerable margin. Scafaria manages to inject poignancy into nearly every scene of the second half of the movie without it ever feeling heavy handed or cloying – a feat we’ve all seen many other directors fuck up and so is doubly impressive for her debut effort in the big chair.

Scafaria is helped out here by some marvellously solid work from her two lead actors. Carrell has effectively played the dislocated Dodge many times before (Little Miss Sunshine, Crazy Stupid Love, presumably Dan In Real Life) but he’s good at his schtick and consistently strikes the right balance between pessimism and dawning hope.  Tackling a harder role though, and knocking it out of the park, is Keira Knightley whose performance is so developed that I completely forgot I normally avoid films with her in them (I suspect Elizabeth Swann has a lot to answer for there).

On the page Penny is a total washout of a cliché; the kooky hipster girl who touts vinyl LPs everywhere (don’t forget Scafaria is also a musician), wears macramé shawls and just can’t seem to get her life together (it might be all the drugs, Penny). Under Knightley’s watch though, she’s transformed into what these characters’ writers actually want them to be: sassy-but-vulnerable, savvy-but-oblivious, likeable-yet-anarchic. Knightley’s performance is an absolute delight and neatly covers up some of the abrupt changes in motivation her character is required to make to make the story function.

Keira Knightley - dispensing charm since 2012

Outside the central pair, there’s still a lot to like about Scafaria’s apocalyptic vision. Seeking A Friend seems to make the assumption that the end of the world might actually bring out the best in people. After all, if you know you’re going to die in three weeks and you have no hope or avoiding your fate, why not just be kind to each other? Why not have a party? Why not show up to work anyway? There’s a lovely scene in the first act where Melanie Lynskey plays a party guest who decides to wear everything she always said she’d wear someday; tiara, gloves, fur coat etc. I think it’s meant to be a joke but for me, it was actually uplifting to see characters determined to pack their last days full of experiences rather than despair.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is ultimately not as solid a film as Safety Not Guaranteed was (I see them as being made for roughly the same audience) but is nonetheless a fairly solid summer movie and a nice break from the typical rom-com you might expect.