Review of Celeste & Jesse Forever (2012) by Mike T — 02 Aug 2012

At the expense of overburdening a sentence with too many twee abbreviations, you nonetheless wouldn't be wrong describing Celeste and Jesse Forever as an "alt-rom-com". While it has more than enough golly-gee-lovely moments to go around, it's quite a bit more than a twist on the standard young-people in and out of love story.

Rashida Jones (who co-wrote the script with Will McCormack, who also appears as the scene-stealing weed-dealer Skillz) stars as Celeste, one half of the titular best-friend pair with Adam Samberg's Jesse. They have a fantastic relationship: they finish each others' sentences and share jokes so "in" that they leave their best friends befuddled. The problem is they've been married for years and are now separated, on their way to divorce, and seemingly have never gotten along better.

What elevates the film above standard stuff (besides the fantastic performance from Jones) is that, were Celeste and Jesse even a near-typical film, it would chart the bumps and small cute bruises the pair would suffer on their way to both wisdom and, ultimately, a loving reunion. And in a sense, it does exactly that, but what the film concerns itself with is Celeste (and to a slightly lesser extent Jesse) and her ability to-for lack of a better term-grow as an individual.

It's not super-brilliant or full of deeply perceived observations, but it's nonetheless minor-key revelatory: Celeste and Jesse Forever is a romantic film, a comedic film, and one that's most interested in a woman figuring out how to love herself. And thanks to a stellar script from Jones and McCormack, it does all of that without ever descending into self-congratulation or masturbatory new-age (is that still at thing) platitudiness (if that's not a thing, it is now, and Celeste and Jesse Forever is not it).

What that means, though, is that it's not much of a first-date film. Or a second-date film, either. There's no "true love" or "fate" in the film. No one is "destined to be together". Characters are cruel to each other, they make mistakes, and no cherub peeks his fat baby head out from behind a Prius to fix anything with movie magic. Instead, just as in some approximation of real life, characters make decisions and compromises, and figure out how to deal.

Make no mistake, though, these characters do not exist in your or my real life. Rather, they live in a beautiful Los Angeles peopled with beautiful folks, trendy speakeasies and very much money. If Celeste and Jesse Forever has any great flaw-and that's very much an if-it's that it's almost completely uncritical of its characters' very indulgent Hollywood lifestyle, something that one wouldn't be wrong to be irritated by. But it's no great big deal, especially in a movie that's doing so much other fantastic, interesting and maybe even progressive stuff.