Life > February 28, 2008

By Kell Wilson | Editor-in-chief

A good romantic comedy is hard to come by. Either the jokes aren’t funny, the acting is atrocious or the relationship is completely unrealistic. If the movie’s really bad, it can even be a combination of all three.

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Luckily for us who admire a good love story, Adam Brooks’ new movie, Definitely, Maybe, is able to avoid becoming another melodramatic romance and provides movie-goers with a refreshing, down-to-earth comedy.

Definitely, Maybe is the story of Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds), a 30-something New Yorker who’s had three chances at love, has somehow ruined them all and is even currently in the middle of divorcing one of the women.

The movie starts out with him picking up his 10-year-old daughter, Maya (Abigail Breslin), from school after her first impromptu sex ed class.

Like most children when learning about sex for the first time, Maya is full of questions that her reluctant father has a hard time answering.

Inevitably the conversation veers towards how Will met her mother, and after Maya finds out that her father had multiple relationships before she was born, the girl demands to know which relationship was with her mom.

Unwilling at first, Will finally consents to tell her all three stories but with one condition: He’ll change all the names of the women and Maya had to figure out for herself which of the ladies was her mother.

Will’s romances start in 1992 with his college sweetheart whom he calls Emily (Elizabeth Banks).

Will has just graduated from college in Wisconsin and is about to leave for New York City to work on the campaign for presidential hopeful Bill Clinton.

Emily fears that the city will change him too much and you immediately feel sorry for her since, as Maya puts it, “everyone knows that the girl at the beginning of the story gets dumped.”

Just before he leaves, Emily asks Will to look up one of her friends in New York and deliver something for her.

Enter “Summer” (Rachel Weisz), the typical corrupting woman who is having sex with her professor and has the ability to destroy careers with her words.

The first time she’s introduced, Summer lacks character depth which makes you resent her at the beginning. However, as the story progresses over the next few years, you get to see a softer, more vulnerable side that makes you root for her, just a little.

The third and final woman is April (Isla Fisher), the copy girl who works with Will on the Clinton campaign.

Her quirky, free-spirited attitude is completely opposite of Will’s business-like approach to everything. She definitely has more personality than both Emily and Summer and you find yourself liking her right off the bat.

The acting by all parties was surprisingly good. It took me a second to accept Reynolds as a father figure since I still remember him from movies like Van Wilder and Waiting.

However, thanks to his acting ability, it didn’t take me long to become invested and connected to his character.

I’m glad that he’s starting to take different roles that showcase his talent.

Breslin is perfect as the 10-year-old daughter whose main goal is to see her father happy again, even if she has to coerce him into it. Out of the three girlfriends, I thought that Fisher was definitely the most intriguing and convincing.

Maybe it was her character’s constant carefree attitude that appealed so much to my similar college student mind-set, but Fisher made her character more lovable and realistic than Weisz or Banks were able to accomplish.

I think one of my favorite things about this movie was that it had me guessing up until the last 20 minutes or so.

The end was totally different then I thought it would be and it made me appreciate the film more for it. In the end, Definitely, Maybe is a feel good love story that doesn’t overload you with sap or horrible plot lines.

Although it can be corny is some places, they are easy enough to over look in the grand scheme of the movie. This isn’t the next Bridget Jones or Love Actually, but it will pick your spirits up and restore your faith in love.