To all the girls he’s loved before

Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds, left) mixes love and politics with April (Isla Fisher) in the romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe. (Universal Pictures)

Will (Ryan Reynolds) is a preppy idealist whose loafers take him from Wisconsin to New York City to work on the presidential campaign of a Democratic star. Those Clinton banners in the campaign headquarters look familiar, but what’s with cell phones the size of blenders and copy girls that worship Nirvana? Seems this is the other Clinton, and the film is flashing back to the halcyon days of 1992.

Nostalgia is accelerating at a rapid pace in movies of late. One of the success stories at this year’s Sundance film Festival was The Wackness, a teen drug dealer dramedy set in 1994 that makes references to Phish and GameBoy. The upcoming Be Kind, Rewind is a lament for the VCR age. And in last Christmas’s Margot at the Wedding, The Pixies and REM are wistfully name-checked by two moms mourning their liberated, pre-monogamous pasts.

That kind of “instant nostalgia” seems to be a favourite pastime of 30-somethings. Blame it, like you blame everything, on the internet. Since it’s now possible to access one’s entire youth — or at least the pop detritus of that youth — at a click, it’s also possible to cocoon in the music, fashion and (maybe) ideals of your lost, simpler self. Those who cling to Me Version 1.0 end up existing in what Jean Baudrillard called a “hyperreality,” a blending of fantasy and reality spurred on by technology; the nostalgic wander dreamlike through the world, forever set apart from the now. (Please pause now to note that this is the first time Baudrillard has come up in a review of a Ryan Reynolds film.)

An idealized past might be Will’s present problem. Now in his late 30s, life is slightly grim, or as grim as things are allowed to get in a twinkly romantic comedy. Though his apartment is set-designer sunny and his Manhattan pristine, Will’s ideals are long compromised; he has left politics for advertising, which he loathes, and is on the brink of a divorce. His joy fix comes in the form of his daughter, Maya, played by Abigail Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine, an actress who has thus far avoided the vaudevillian, monkey-hoofing self-consciousness of lesser — and most — child actors.

On the eve of the divorce, Maya presses her father for the true story of how her parents fell in love. Will, like every good alternadad, is up for some serious oversharing, and the two pull an all-nighter while daddy ruminates on the history of his love life. He masks the identities of Maya’s three potential baby-mamas, just to add a little mystery to the proceedings, which means that the film mirrors almost exactly the plot of a TV series called How I Met Your Mother. Hopefully, the film’s lawyers have heard of it.

Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds, right) tells daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin) how her parents fell in love in Definitely, Maybe. (Universal Pictures)

The result is a kind of three-for-one romantic comedy, casting Will opposite a trio of potential leading ladies. His first love is the Noxzema-fresh college sweetheart he calls Emily (Elizabeth Banks), whom he leaves behind in Madison for the big city. In a pre-breakup phone conversation, he encourages her to come visit and experience the city’s “energy.” Her response: “Energy? Oh, you’re never coming back.” It’s a truthful moment: that phone call when the house of cards that is the long-distance affair collapses with a single observation, an insight unshared.

After Emily is Summer (Rachel Weisz), an aspiring journalist with a borderless, try-anything demeanour, and a Christopher Hitchens-like professor-slash-boyfriend (Kevin Kline, gleefully grumpy). And somewhere in between is April (Isla Fisher), the best friend in Doc Martens whose slacker ways disarm and charm Mr. Five Year Plan.

In this segment in particular, the nostalgia is thick and sweet. April goes backpacking and sends Will postcards — postcards! Theirs is a relationship built from letters and occasional, ill-timed meetings over the years. How would Facebook have altered this slow, simmering attraction? The constant availability of social networking — the “know-all”-ness of the medium — just isn’t sexy; there’s no space for brooding. How can you let your imagination run wild over a crush when you can log in and see what he had for breakfast?

The film shows an unusual respect for these women, and also, for the temple of lost love. There are no “crazy beeyatches” in Will’s past; no really shameful hookups or Hollywood betrayals. His is an ordinary love life under a forgiving microscope, with moments of tenderness — and movie schmaltz — between him and all three women. When Summer sings a torch song to Will in a park, it’s a little cheese, but not a huge wheel — a welcome variation on the agonizing Motown sing-along that’s a staple of this genre.

These loves (mostly) flicker and fade, and as Clinton falls deeper into the abyss — footage of the impeachment hearings looks positively prehistoric — so does Will. He grows more cynical about politics, and love. I can’t recall the last romantic comedy in which the lead goes on a bender and messes up his love life because his heart is broken by a president.

Reynolds has checked that Jackass-era smugness that made him a star in Van Wilder and carried him along in a string of mediocre action movies. Clearly, he’s trying to cross over in this more adult role, and he does fine. He’s not the warmest actor yet, but he’s unquestionably funny, and gives good banter.

Definitely Maybe does a neat trick: It engages in the superficial appeal of the romantic comedy, the chess-piece manoeuvring of stock archetypes, but it stops just short of the saccharine punch line. The nostalgia theme that struck me as original and interesting is hardly overt, but there are enough small moments of intelligent, adult observation that I left thinking about something beyond how the hero’s apartment was decorated, which is about as deep as my thoughts usually go after a romantic comedy these days.

For all its gloss — and a kind of awkward pacing imposed by the structure — the film’s message is the opposite of the princess fantasy that little Maya is seeking; the big reveal would probably crush a real-life 11-year-old. But for the rest of us, it’s radical to see a film proposing that love is fluid, and that there can be several happy endings in one long life. That may not be the Valentine you were expecting, but it’s definitely — maybe — a sweet one.

Definitely Maybe opens Feb. 14.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.

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