I Give It a Year - 8th April 2014

Tuesday Night is Film Night rolls out another romantic comedy tonight and why not? This time we'll see what boxes are ticked as we watch;

I Give It a Year

From the pen of Dan Mazer and under his direction too, I Give It a Year is an English romantic comedy from 2013 with a pretty decent cast list, more of them later, but before you start shouting "same old, same old", you can throw away the rule book on this one as Dan Mazer does an amazing job! (Really must try to avoid so much alliteration in these blogs!)

Quick synopsis on the story; we follow newly weds Nat and Josh as they enter into their first year of marriage, the only problem is although they start off happy, their differences rise to the fore and their friends are not convinced the wedded bliss will last, so much so........ and there we get the title.

That's really all you need to know about the story, apart from each member of the couple develops or redevelops feelings for another person, thus making this a four handed relationship. So in reality the film starts with the normal ending; the wedding and we start to see the relationship deteriorate, but let us not put a downer on proceedings oh no, because what this film loses in the downward spiral of the romance, is a rise in absolute, laugh out loud, rolling in the aisles, comedy. There are just too many comedic moments too mention and it's not just the dialogue, there are the subtleties too, like the background jokes, the layered moments where a foreground line is supplemented by background joke. It is certainly a film that you will want to watch again, only if to see all the jokes you missed first time around.

Onto the cast, the lead characters; Nat and Josh are played by Rose Byrne and Rafe Spall respectively. You may recall Rose Byrne from such films as; Bridesmaids and Knowing, while Rafe Spall has been in films like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Byrne and Spall play their characters extremely well, bringing with them varying degrees of pathos and / or lunacy dependent on what the script calls for. However what they also do, is provide a conduit for the supporting cast to play off. Of note are; Stephen Merchant as the hapless, gormless and tactless friend and best-man to Josh. Some superb, often cringeworthy, but always immaculately delivered lines from Mr. Merchant, very reminiscent of Darren Lamb from Extras. Also, the absolutely wonderful, can't praise her enough, fantastically talented, (is that enough superlatives?) Olivia Colman is utterly brilliant as the utterly useless, but hilarious marriage councillor. The scenes with Colman are absolute gems and incredibly funny, a credit to the writing skills of Dan Mazer and the acting skills of Olivia Colman.

Other characters / actors of note are; Minnie Driver who plays the straight talking Naomi, whose interchanges with her husband; Hugh (Jason Flemyng) are sublime to watch and again extremely funny. There are parts too for the lovely Jane Asher (Nat's mother) and the "showing his age" Nigel Planer (playing Josh's dad). Both of these characters have some exquisite moments, although you will have to wait until the very end credits for Jane Asher's most brilliant line, but is is worth the wait.

So there you pretty much have it, a brilliant story which reverses the formulaic romantic comedy approach, whilst still providing sufficient romance for the film to hold onto that romantic genre moniker, while on the other hand the comedy part of the rom-com coupling is more than well looked after with the Dan Mazer script, we literally laughed our way through the film with all of the really eye wateringly funny moments that were so brilliantly delivered. Checking on Mazer's previous form, we can see he was partly responsible for a lot of the writing and producing of the Sacha Baron Cohen films, Bruno, Borat etc. so clearly an eye and a pen for extremely funny comedy.

I Give It a Year will unequivocally be on the "Must See Again" list of films, if only to laugh once more at what we have previously seen, whilst trying to spot all the jokes we missed first time around.

TNiFN Rating 91%

IMDB Link