Review of Long Shot (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

Earlier this week I read an article about how some people were so pissed at a 90 second sex scene in Long Shot that there was shouting at the premier from people who were psychically revolted by the idea of female orgasm without foreplay after a minute and a half. This obviously made me more curious about seeing the movie and I get the sense after having huddled with Wife that Long Shot may be a bit of a divisive film. In some ways, I’m inclined to say that the film was sort of the movie equivalent of a 90 second orgasm, which, depending on where you stand on that debate is either kind of disappointing and shameful for all parties involved or a modest and realistic depiction of some aspects of human desire in the second decade of the 2000s.

In some ways, I think that Long Shot is more a movie about people in their late 30s and early 40s dating one another. In that way, it’s a kind of interesting cultural artifact for understanding Generation Y as it enters into its “mid-life crisis” phase. I’m a little bit hard-pressed to think of the last time I watched a rom-com starring two people that were of that age. (After talking to Wife and Friends about this last night, they mentioned Juliet, Naked and, in fact, Rose Byrne and Chris O’Dowd are both exactly 39 years of age, and Ethan Hawke is 86.).

On the issue of divisiveness, I fall into the camp of labeling this film a pretty run-of-the-mill Fantasy-Fulfillment movie for schlubby males of a certain age. For me, it’s hard to see what kind of analogy for the real world is being set up by a successful career politician falling in love with an unemployed man-child with a penchant for emotional outbursts. At a certain point the scenario seems too specific to have applications to a realistic or sympathetic referent in our regular experiences. This is when Wife stopped me and said, “I think it’s supposed to be more of an opposites attract” movie, which kind of took me aback, because I was expecting her to have a more critical take. I said, “But why do the ‘opposites’ always have to be the same? Pretty, smart woman” and unemployed dumpster muppet? Which she allowed. But her initial impulse about the movie having a certain kind of charm has been echoed in some reviews, including at Slate.

“I liked the fact that the movie was about the lead up to her announcement rather than whether she would win the presidency,” Wife said. “It made it lower stakes.” Maybe it’s the case that the modest scope of the romance works in its favor, and likewise that the winter sequence’s relative brevity is excusable, maybe even preferable for what Long Shot was trying to do.

Jackson O’Shea is darling in this movie, by the way.

The soundtrack was a lot of fun, especially the moments created by a languorous and moody Moon River by Frank Ocean and Aretha Franklin’s rendition of Bridge Over Troubled Waters. The film kind of encourages musical jokes because so much of their conversation and their interactions in social situations has to do with music: discussing their favorite music, seeing pop idols from the 90s, listening to an iPhone in the backroom of a restaurant.