Producers: Deanna Barillari, Laura Lewis, Theodore Dunlap, Sam Bisbee, Audrey Rosenberg, Jess Jacobs Director: Steve Basilone Screenplay: Steve Basilone Cast: Finn Wittrock, Zoë Chao, Casey Wilson, Jim Rash, Damon Wayans Jr. and Wendi McLendon-Covey Distributor: Stage 6 Films
Grade: C+
In what might be called the genre of “impossible romances”—in which the lovers aren’t simply forbidden to one another for some reason, but literally prevented from coming together for reasons of time or space—there are some classics. Joseph Mankiewicz’s bewitching 1947 fantasy “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” represents the gold standard; by comparison Steve Basilone’s “Long Weekend” deserves at best a bronze.
The film resembles a sort of gender-reversal take on Brad Anderson’s 2001 “Happy Accidents,” and like it is pleasant but thin. Finn Wittrock stars as Bart, a writer who, as is indicated early on, is suffering from both emotional and health problems. He is also in financial difficulty, at point of moving out of the apartment he’d shared with his ex-girlfriend.
He has a place to crash—provided by his married friends Doug and Rachel (Damon Wayans Jr. and Casey Wilson)—and gets a rather humble job writing advertising copy for a medical supply company—but he’s still depressed. And when he goes to a movie with a bottle as company, he falls asleep in a drunken stupor, only to be woken up after the show by vivacious Vienna (Zoë Chao), who promptly invites him to take her for a drink. They spend the night together, and he’s completely smitten.
But Vienna’s a peculiar young woman. She has no cell phone or I.D. and carries only cash (plenty of it), but is staying in a prosaic motel. Doug advises Brad to be careful, but he’s too taken with the gamin-like girl to listen. He does press her for some background, though, until she finally admits that she’s from the future—2052, to be precise. She claims to work for the NSA, but has come back in time on her own: her mother is ill with cancer, and she needs money to pay for an operation. So she intends to buy some stock she knows will go up in value, lock the shares in a safety deposit box, and then return to the future to retrieve and sell them. So while she’s as much in love with Bart as he is with her. their romance can be but a brief encounter.
Brad is understandably reluctant to believe Vienna’s story, but eventually succumbs when she offers some confirmation in a song that’s in synch with the film’s title.
Thus far “Long Weekend” has been a sweet if fragile tale, with a nice rapport between Wittrock and Chao and agreeable support from Wayans, Jim Rash as Bart’s new boss, and Wendi McClendon-Covey as his erstwhile landlady. It takes a rather sharp, serious turn toward the close, however, suggesting first that Vienna might have been rather different from the person Bart believed her to be, and then that she was not only the Vienna Bart had come to love, but that she might have had (as Doug suggests) a secret motive for what she did.
Quite honestly, the final act of the picture doesn’t parse as well as it might, and for enjoyment’s sake it’s best not to try to work it all out logically. After all, stories of this kind aren’t usually strong on logic anyway.
The film looks nice, thanks not only to the stars and some well-chosen outdoor locations but the production design by Jen Dunlap and cinematography by Felipe Vara de Rey. The editing by Libby Cuenin and Stephanie Kaznocha keeps it trim, and Lauren Culjak’s score avoids being too cutesy.
But like “Happy Accidents,” “Long Weekend” is ultimately just an extended exercise in whimsy that lacks the final measure of magic that would put it in the upper echelons of “impossible” romantic comedies.