Actually, it’s really all about how to find your soul mate.
By Josh Lasser
There is a complaint issued via voiceover at the beginning of How to Be Single about women’s stories always being told through relationships. This is followed by the audience being informed that the story we’re about to get isn’t about relationships. It is exceptionally disappointing then, but in no way whatsoever a surprise, that the rest of the movie focuses heavily on relationships.
Right up front, How to Be Single offers a tortured sort of logic on the nature of its existence. There’s absolutely a way to twist the film into it being about people (men and women) finding themselves, but all of the finding in the movie—all of the self-searching—comes about during, through, or is directly caused by relationships.
Rather than having a single narrative, the movie offers several intersecting stories put together into one film. It finds difficulty here as it means that each individual story doesn’t go terribly deep.
First and foremost, there is the tale of Alice (Dakota Johnson), who deeply loves her boyfriend of four years but decides as she’s graduating college that she’d like to be single anyway, just to see what that’s like and to make sure she’s chosen the right guy. Then, there is Alice’s sister, Meg (Leslie Mann), an obstetrician who is determined to never need anyone (adult or infant). There is Lucy (Alison Brie) who has put together a computer program to find the right man. There is Robin (Rebel Wilson), who is interested in nothing outside of free booze and one night stands. Then there’s Tom (Anders Holm) who runs a bar and sleeps with as many women as he possibly can as often as he possibly can. Each and every one of the characters can easily be defined by their relationships or desire for relationships or desire to avoid relationships.
We want to hear it.
Setting aside whatever How to be Single may say it’s about versus what it’s actually about, the Christian Ditter-directed film is ostensibly a comedy. It definitely has touching moments, and there are a few light chuckles to be found, but it fails at making one laugh on any sort of a regular basis.
Much of this has to do with the characters themselves, most of whom are utterly one-note and who therefore wind up repeating the same not-terribly-funny-the-first-time things throughout the movie. The best examples of this are Robin and Meg.
Robin is the exact sort of role one would expect to see Rebel Wilson in. She is loud, the life of the party, and tends to think she’s doing great even if there’s obviously something hidden going on underneath the surface. Robin exists mainly to offer Alice tips about single life, some of which are smart, but most of which aren’t. Over the course of the movie Wilson gets the most laughs, mainly due to her exuberance.
Mann’s Meg is the most adult of all the characters and despite insisting she doesn’t want a kid, when she’s forced to watch a baby for more than 30 seconds she changes her mind. This proves problematic as she also meets a younger man in whom she’s interested. While her initial encounter with Ken (Jake Lacy) is funny, as Meg attempts to hide her pregnancy and goes off on him for being too young, the same conversation is repeated every time the two of them are together making it impossible to imagine what Ken sees in her.
In the end, Alice is at the center of the film, and she does grow and change and mature over the course of it. Johnson is winning enough in the role that it is possible to forgive some of the character’s more foolish moments and just root for her to figure out what post-college life is like, but with the movie’s split focus there’s just not enough time to truly explore the character as much as she deserves.
A relatively breezy film over the course of its run, How to Be Single only becomes truly depressing when it gets overly serious (why it would choose to do this with Damon Wayans Jr.’s character is perplexing). Even when it isn’t depressing though, the characters are too flat and cartoon-like while the jokes are too few, too far between, and too often repeated to make the movie a fun experience.
How to Be Single is most easily—and best—described as a romantic comedy. It is about a group of people looking for the right relationship and the various ways they proceed (or don’t) about finding such a relationship. However, it attempts to position itself as the exact opposite for no particular, discernible reason (cynics would suggest it’s for marketing purposes). Whatever the case may be, it is neither very funny nor very romantic. There are unquestioned moments that work — Leslie Mann is incredibly engaging (even if she’s one-note) and steals the movie — but it is still a disappointment.
