In the middle of the road, two young women shout profanities and expletives at one another, one accusing the other of cutting them off, the other making the accusation that their side-view mirror was almost clipped. They’re actually best friends and this is their little in-joke. These are the most interesting and funniest moments in Life Partners, a queer film about friendship that’s as boring as a straight film about friendship. Paige and Sasha are best friends. Paige is straight and Sasha is gay. When Paige finds a steady boyfriend, Sasha’s role in her life changes, where she’s forced to contemplate her role in life in general.
After watching a bunch of films about friendships and relationships in succession (Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats and Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha), it’s interesting to note the amount of time each director gives the audience to establish the friendship that is, ostensibly, the core of the film. Dolan opts not to do it at all, eschewing a more traditional narrative and allowing the characters to exist on their own terms, but within the same space. Baumbach is slightly more of a traditionalist, but uses the friendship between his two leads to inform the shift in Frances’s (Greta Gerwig) life when she’s forced to make her way through life without that staple. Though 15 minutes or so is spent with the couple, as it were, their relationship dynamic is boiled down to a 90-second montage. Life Partners sets up the relationship between Paige and Sasha in an ever more traditional manner, built less on montage and more on several scenes acquainting the audience with their idiosyncrasies and habits.
And, in a similar way to Frances Ha, the film about how one character reacts to the evolving dynamic with her best friend as well as reexamining her own life. Yet, unlike Frances Ha, it’s not particularly charming or funny, and every emotional beat that it technically gets correct was far more articulately and artfully done in Frances Ha. Both Leighton Meester and Gillian Jacobs are very charming, but writer/director Susanna Fogel seems hellbent on spelling out the complexities of their friendship without allowing much to be implied. Nuances are explained and/or simplified, so emotional arcs seem to have less of an impact in the long run. The myopia of its characters also feels uninteresting, as not only does it not feel very sincere, its ending reversal of redemption feel clichéd and contrived.
It pains me to say this, because Life Partners, on its surface, wants to offer something lovely and enchanting, if not particularly ambitious. But very little about the film, or its leads, are actually compelling. Sasha is defined by her aloofness, irresponsibility, and penchant for dating equally immature, younger girls. Paige is more type-A, slightly neurotic, and finds a guy (Adam Brody) who seems to complement her various personality quirks. Sasha becomes jealous and realizes she’s becoming replaced; Paige gets annoyed at having to deal with Sasha’s life, which is in turmoil. BUT THEY’RE BEST FRIENDS WHO NEED EACH OTHER.
It isn’t that Life Partners is bad, it just feels very old and stale. Making one of the characters gay doesn’t mean much because the different experiences that a straight friend and a queer friend would go through aren’t really ever explored. While it may be an attempt to step in the direction of homonormativity, which, to some degree, is commendable, it makes it seem all the blander because this kind of story feels rather commonplace now. Another thing to be commended might be the fact that it’s a female friendship, but again, the characters, however detailed the film may think they are, doesn’t change the fact that there’s a tiresome quality to their actual trajectories.
Meester is pleasant as the failed musician wondering what direction her life should go. She’s entirely watchable, her strength being some of the film’s more emotional scenes. Yet, at once, there’s little beyond those scenes that make her performance unique. The script’s dialogue isn’t strong enough to give neither Meester nor Jacobs the kind of back and forth repartee to be truly memorable, so their performances sit at the bar of “pleasant”.
Its ambitions are rather reserved, their aim to basically tell a story about friendship. But the friendship is so unexciting that it’s hard to be very enthusiastic about it. The comparison to Frances Ha now seems inevitable. There’s a scene where Paige and Sasha argue about no longer talking to their best friend at 2am, with Sasha shouting, “Nothing changed for you. You still have someone you can talk to at 2am.” In Frances Ha, Frances, after a drunken fight with her best friend Sophie, lays on the bed. She turns on her side and looks into the mirror at herself. She says the same thing without uttering a word.