Friends with Benefits

The words "damaged" and "emotionally unavailable" get thrown around a lot in Friends with Benefits as a means of explaining why two attractive young professionals like Dylan (Justin Timberlake) and Jamie (Mila Kunis) would opt for a sex-only relationship instead of looking for something deeper. It's a busy and cruel world out there, why not schedule sex like it was a Pilates class instead of taking the risk of getting dumped by a John Mayer fan? (Emma Stone in a hoot of a cameo) Director Will Gluck goes for the same emotional honesty here that he achieved in the winning Easy A; as more about the leads' backgrounds are revealed it becomes all too clear why Dylan and Jamie would bail out of the search for their true opposite number. Gluck also isn't afraid to take Friends with Benefits into semi-dramatic territory. That choice is to Gluck's credit, though it yields uneven results. Patricia Clarkson appears ready to have a good time as Jamie's swinging mother, and Richard Jenkins turns up as Dylan's Alzheimer's-stricken dad. Both characters are reduced to advice-givers though, and Jenkins' character feels particularly ill-conceived. There's a scene in an airport that anyone who has cared for a person with Alzheimer's could find frightening and all too true, but Gluck and his writers turn it into a semi-comic moment of father-son bonding.

Friends with Benefits has a wonderful zip in its early scenes, which involve Jamie recruiting Dylan for a job at GQ. The movie is knowing about the ways that romantic comedies influence our perceptions about what's possible in love, and there are gags about the ubiquity of Katherine Heigl and the cliched endings of sappy movies. (A movie within the movie starring Jason Segel and Rashida Jones is very funny.) It's all too obvious that Jamie and Dylan will end up together, since they seem to like talking to each other as much as doing anything else. Kunis is good at making Jamie turned on by conversation, but both she and Dylan thoroughly enjoy doing something else. The sex scenes are plentiful and lively, and fans of either lead will get a kick out of the amount of skin on display. Yet it's hard to feel too unhappy for these two successful and attractive people with access to easy sex, and I wonder what a Friends with Benefits made with lesser-known or slightly less attractive leads would have felt like. Gluck attempts to take his movie to a place that romantic comedies don't usually go, but the media-centric New York that Dylan and Jamie inhabit feels as airy and out-of-reach as Hogwarts and that prevents  the enjoyable Friends with Benefits from cutting as deep as it might have otherwise. One other note on the cast: Woody Harrelson is being beaten up for his turn as a gay colleague of Dylan's, but his performance is a triumph of professionalism. It would have been easy for Harrelson to show up and rely on affectations to get through the role, but the character he creates is a three-dimensional and often very funny one. Friends with Benefits is worth a matinee; it's buzzed on its own energy and makes an honest effort to say something about the way we live now.