Definitely, Maybe first published by Film4, 18 January 2008
“I’m gonna tell you the story and I’m not telling you who your mum is, you have to figure that out for yourself. I’m gonna change all of the names and some of the facts.”
This is how thirty-something Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) introduces the tale of his premarital history to his 10-year-old daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin) – and while the advertising executive may give his erotic chronicles a decidedly romantic spin, we know from the start that this is to be no children’s fairytale.
The story begins in 1992, with fresh-faced Will arriving in New York to work on the presidential campaign for a then equally fresh-faced Bill Clinton – a figure with his own messy erotic entanglements. Over the next sixteen years, three very different women will drift in and out of Will’s picture, changing the course of both his life and their own. Could Maya’s mother turn out to be Will’s college sweetheart Emily (Elizabeth Banks), magically transformed from girl next door to urban princess? Or does Maya come after April (Isla Fisher), Will’s zany apolitical friend with chronic bad timing? Or did Maya appear nine months after Summer (Rachel Weisz), the adventurous, ambitious writer whose attraction to Will is matched by her thing for the older, decadent academic Hampton Roth (a show-stopping Kevin Kline)? It does not really matter which one – for with Will now on the brink of divorce, this is one bedtime story that definitely (maybe) cannot have a happy ending.
It may feature a little kid who combines precocious wisdom with criminal cuteness, but make no mistake, Definitely, Maybe is aimed squarely at the adult end of the romantic comedy market, in territories previously occupied by Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989). All the tell-tale signs are there: the on-again off-again tango of modern love, the nervy bustle of the Big Apple, the wittiest of erotic banter, and relationships that are shown to mature and deepen over time – with no sassy, over-accessorised teens to spoil the mood.
Writer/director Adam Brooks has previously penned such bland rom-com fare as Beeban Kidron’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and Richard Loncraine’s Wimbledon (2004), but with Definitely, Maybe, as with his much earlier script for Lawrence Kasdan’s French Kiss (1995), he has hit upon a formula that may well appeal even to the genre’s most fervent haters (i.e. men, mostly). Look into the heart of Definitely, Maybe and you will find what is essentially the conceit of TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother reduced to feature length – but by tying Will’s ups and downs to the Clinton era, Brooks is able to bring both politics and nostalgia to this tale of erotic betrayal and second chances.
Best of all, the ending manages to defy all predictability, and to admit some decidedly unromantic realities (disappointment, disillusion, divorce) even as it still delivers on all the genre’s fluffiest conventions. Of course Will marries one of his love interests, and of course he winds up with one of them in the closing reel. Yet given that at one time or another he has loved all three, the bittersweet lesson to be derived from his twisted tale is that you find ‘the one’ only in children’s stories, whereas in real life, far from being eternal, true love, like political commitment, is very much rooted in timing, contingency and the vagaries of personality – or, to borrow one of Maya’s terms, lovers are always only ‘rehearsing’, even after their big day.
Strap: How I met your mother: Adam Brooks’ sophisticated bedtime story politicises its rom while rooting its com in bittersweet realism
Anton Bitel
