Twenty-year-old Dan and Mel have been dating for six years now and although they are constantly declaring their love to each other, it is clear that the magic is definitely rubbing off their romance. After she staggers home late and drunk one night, Mel picks a fight with Dan which ends up with him in the Hospital’s Emergency Room getting a head wound sorted out. Next day a sober Mel is distraught and apologetic but she has obviously hurt a great deal more then her boyfriend’s skull this time.
They are both finishing up at College and Dan is already working part-time as an Intern at a record company and is hoping that they will actually offer him a job soon. Mel wants to be a schoolteacher so their plan is that when Dan graduates they will stay on in Texas whilst she takes a final course at school to qualify. However whilst Mel is content to just hang out with her close-knit college gal pals as she has always done, Dan wants to branch out and start socialising with his new music business friends. When he eventually persuades Mel to go to a party to hang out with them she sulks off home after having just one drink leaving Dan on his own to deal with all the temptations of a summer pool party where the drink is flowing. He cannot resist and ends up somewhat impulsively kissing Amanda his pretty co-worker who has been flirting with him in the office for sometime now.
That’s not a problem until Mel finds out and then another fight between the two of them ensues, but this time its out in public and results in the Police getting involved and hauling Dan off to spend a night in jail. That certainly cools his ardor down for Mel, and it looks like a temporary break from each other that he now insists on, could possibly become permanent. Whilst he is pondering this all he actually gets his job offer and it is even better than he had expected or hoped for. There is however one small snag, it would mean that he would need to move across country to Brooklyn. Its a move that his mother says that if he doesn’t make, he will regret it all her life exactly as she had done with some of her own life choices. Mel on the other hand will not even listen to Dan’s ideas on how he could take the job and still make their relationship work albeit ling distance, as she screams out the same mantra that she seems permanently struck on these days of ‘how could you do this too me?’
It is really the question that poor Dan should ask as after yet another fight he ends up in the hospital again with a very bloodied injury, much to the resigned face of the Emergency Room nurse. We sort of feel the same too by now.
It’s a straightforward enough story and makes far more sense than writer/director Hannah Fidell’s rather annoying previous film ‘A Teacher,’ but why she chose to make it quite so melodramatic is still quite a mystery. The two leads are admirably played by Taissa Farmiga(actor/director Vera’s younger sister) and Ben Rosenfield but the script simply does not allow us to empathize with them much at all, especially as it is inevitable from a very early point in the movie how it is all going to end. The ‘journey’ to this point is a tad long and fails to really completely engage the audience.
It had been produced by the talented Duplass Brothers and no doubt their fans will want to see this one but they maybe a little disappointed : it is certainly not one of their best.
