“I Do… Until I Don’t” is about as good as its title. That is to say, “I Do… Until I Don’t” is bad.
It’s the worst breed of bad movie, too: distinctly not-good but far from detestable. I felt the same way about writer-director-star Lake Bell’s previous (and first) film, “In a World” (an unpopular opinion, by the way, about a movie that landed a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes). There’s something distinctly disposable about Bell’s directorial sensibility; like countless writer-director-stars before her, Bell makes films that are unabashed reflections of her comedic persona — in her case: soft-spoken, slightly confused, harmless. Neither of her films betray any real affection for her chosen art form — these movies, especially the new one, could just as well be viewed on an iPhone in low-definition as in a movie theater.
“I Do… Until I Don’t” centers on three couples: Wyatt Cenac and Amber Heard, Paul Reiser and Mary Steenburgen, and Lake Bell and Ed Helms. Cenac and Heard are the hippy, open-relationship couple; Reiser and Steenburgen are the older, toxic-marriage couple, and Bell and Helms are the high-strung, boring couple. These three couples become the subjects of a malicious filmmaker’s new documentary about marriage. Hijinks ensue.
Vivian (Dolly Wells) is the woman behind the camera, a pretentious caricature of a documentary filmmaker. She orchestrates events so as to support her film’s narrative, and is subconsciously making her movie to denigrate the institution of marriage because she’s bitter about being alone.
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Early on in the film, Bell’s character, Alice, decides to start giving handjobs at a local happy-endings massage parlor so as to avoid telling her husband (Ed Helms) that she’d gone and screwed up their finances by agreeing to do the documentary for free. Then the movie progresses and forgets about the handjob tangent entirely. Point being: it’s not funny. It’s indicative of the movie’s overall weirdness, and yet, this lack of narrative attention hardly warrants enough outrage to actually care.
Wyatt Cenac is a fun on-screen presence, no thanks to the script. His “nah, must go!” in response to a surfer dude’s “namaste” is pretty good stuff. Ditto for “Begone, Egon!” which he says to the same surfer dude (whose name is Egon). Paul Reiser and Mary Steenburgen play a hostile married couple almost exactly as you’d imagine Paul Reiser and Mary Steenburgen would play a hostile married couple — Reiser is a bit of a self-centered jerk, Steenburgen is sort of uptight and Steenburgen-y, and that’s the extent of it.
The lack of substance here is frustrating, but the lack of originality is even more so. I’m reminded of better films about egotistical documentarians ruining people’s lives: Albert Brooks’ “Real Life,” the James Gandolfini-starring “Cinema Verite” (neither is a particularly good movie, both are immeasurably better than “I Do… Until I Don’t.”) Even more recently, the terrific Lifetime series “Unreal” dealt with many of the same ethical questions — in that case, it’s the world of reality TV instead of prestige documentary filmmaking — in far more complex and interesting terms.
What it comes down to is a distinct air of too-cool-for-school lack of ambition. There’s none to be found here whatsoever. Every scene is a badly-executed trope, every character a badly-written archetype, every shot a disinterestedly-composed throwaway.
Stay far away from this movie. Go watch “Real Life” or “Unreal” or just do something else entirely. Watch an actively bad movie, one that you can get worked up about — “The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature” is probably still in theaters at this point, and I hear it’s maddening. But do yourself a favor and don’t watch “I Do… Until I Don’t.” Disengaged and detached, the film’s greatest crime may be its inability to make any kind of impression. [C-]