Something Borrowed is a film that starts off looking clichéd and ordinary, but that develops over the course of it’s runtime into something so egregiously contemptible that you will walk out of the theater seething with hatred toward everyone involved in its production. Or at least you will if you have a brain in your head and even a small sense of decency. I’m sure a lot of the hate for this movie is going to be aimed toward Kate Hudson. Audiences fell in love with her back in 2000’s Almost Famous and ever since she has let people down by appearing in disappointing film after disappointing film, with only an acceptable turn sprinkled in here and there to break up the crap. Every time she’s in another bad movie the cry of “Why does Kate Hudson keep getting to make movies?” gets louder and louder, and it looks more and more ridiculous every time she is cast in something new. Hudson isn’t really a bad actress though, just one that has shown a pretty limited range up to this point. It’s not her presence that sinks films, just her poor taste in picking projects that highlights something as probably being terrible before anybody even sees it. I don’t know why she makes the movies she does, or how she manages to show up looking bubbly and fresh time after time; but with Something Borrowed even Hudson is starting to look wore out and weary. She plays a character that, at one point in her career, would have come off as overbearing but charming, but who now just plays like a Frankenstein monster mashup of Absolutely Fabulous and Sex and the City. And despite the fact that Hudson’s name will get thrown around more than anybody else’s when people spew hate and bile at this film, her presence is the least of its problems. Something Borrowed’s failures start at its roots and extend all the way to its highest branches. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s a tree of suck.
A lot of romantic comedies fall victim to relying on the clichés of the genre to affect an audience, and this movie is one of them. You get a scene where characters make each other jealous by sexy dancing, a scene where one character helps another write heartfelt vows to the person that they are in love with as well, a scene in which a character tells another “you are home to me”, etc… There are also scenes that are so laughably bad that they feel like moments you’d see being sent up on Mystery Science Theater 3000. There’s a great one where Ginnifer Goodwin jogs into the frame and it’s immediately clear by her awkward motions that she’s never actually went running in her life. She then sort of tries to pretend that she’s out of breath for maybe a second before jumping into a dialogue scene. I bet Crow T. Robot would have had a good time with that one. In another she sad walks in the rain while reflecting on past mistakes. We hear Radiohead’s sappy anthem “Fake Plastic Trees” over the soundtrack while she walks, and the song fades in and out every time we go to or come back from a flashback in a manner reminiscent of the episode of Arrested Development where the sad Charlie Brown music starts playing every time George-Michael puts his head down and starts shuffling his feet. Except this movie was serious about it. Tom Servo would have had a field day. None of these things are the real reason this movie is so bad though. Clichés, while kind of hacky, become clichés because they work. And moments so bad they’re funny can lend a film a bit of ironic charm. For Something Borrowed, the problems go much deeper than quibbles like this. When arranging the notes I took while watching this film it slowly started to dawn on me that everything I wrote could be divided into two columns, one entitled “I hate the characters” and the other “I hate the story”. Before we get into all of that though, let’s do a little run through of the characters and the people who play them, just for clarity’s sake.
The central conflict of the story is a love triangle between Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin), Darcy (Kate Hudson), and Dex (Colin Egglesfield). Rachel and Darcy have been best friends practically since birth. Rachel and Dex went to law school together and always had mutual crushes on one another, but never voiced their feelings. Darcy and Dex are engaged to be married. You can see why all of this might be a problem, especially when all of the characters are liars and cheaters. Ginnifer Goodwin plays Rachel as the typical buttoned down, bookish, trod upon brunette of the film. She is always adorable and always brings an earnestness to everything she does, but in this one she proved to me that there is such a thing as being too cutesy and too much of an emotional open book. For most of the film it feels as if she’s drowning while yelling, “Love me, love me”, and it’s mostly because she’s frantically trying to compensate for how poorly constructed her character is. Despite the fact that she is a forever tread-upon doormat, Rachel is also a contemptible little cretin who starts lying, cheating, and destroying lives from within the first five minutes of the film. This would be fine if we were watching an edgy drama about flawed people and the mistakes that they make, but this is a romantic comedy and we’re supposed to be relating to and sympathizing with the characters as they do terrible things to one another. Goodwin puts forth a Herculean effort to try and make that possible, but just ends up looking desperate in the process.
Kate Hudson plays Darcy as the typical, self-centered, ditzy, party-girl blonde of the film. She’s supposed to be an adorable ball of energy that can be at times annoying because of how easily she glides through life without any hardships, but somewhere early on the train goes off the rails for that goal. If there’s one thing Hudson does well it’s act plucky, but here she comes off less like a good time and more like a destructive force of addiction and megalomania. Despite the fact that Darcy is the thing standing between Rachel and her dream man, it wouldn’t make sense that she should be painted as the villain of the piece. Instead, any rational film would treat her as a likable, but unfortunate complication. Here she is Cruella Deville. She’s thoughtless, vain, drunk, and insulting to everyone around her every second that she is on screen; and Hudson’s war weary face just doesn’t have the life left in it to make us smile while swallowing it. She seems to be through playing this sort of role in this sort of movie, and audiences seem to be through wanting to watch her do it. I just don’t understand why nobody is able to make the first move and stop the madness. Either she has to stop taking these roles or we have to stop buying tickets to see her play them. Let’s come together and end the circle of abuse.
Colin Egglesfield plays one of the principle characters in this film and yet he’s hardly worth mentioning in a review. As the conflicted Dex he is more wooden than Pinocchio with an erection. Watching him try to emote during the big moments becomes an uncomfortable chore that kept me cringing and peeking through my fingers like I was watching the latest entry in the Saw franchise. You get the same feeling out of Egglesfield in this movie that you would get if you cast a Land’s End catalogue and asked it to play a male lead. And I’m not talking about a model from the catalogue; I’m talking about the catalogue itself. Watching paint dry, reading the phonebook, these are the clichés that spring to mind when I think about trying to describe his performance. And really, they might be the only way to adequately describe what he does. To come up with an original metaphor for bland would give the performance too much credit.
The only bright spots of the cast, and of the entire film, are John Krasinski’s Ethan and Ashley Williams’ Claire. Krasinski is pretty much just doing a take on his Jim character from The Office, but he’s more Jim here than he has been on that show in a long time. He works best as a personality when he is a little bit downtrodden, when he’s the underdog. I want to watch John Krasinski chase the girl, not get the girl. When things start going his way, he kind of just comes off as being one of the smug white people who populate the rest of the cast of this film. Here he is very much the lovable loser, and it was a reminder to me that he could be a likable actor. He is kind of a jerk in that he sleeps with a girl and then tries to ditch her afterwards, but in comparison to the rest of the characters that makes him a saint. Especially when that girl is the hilariously overbearing Claire. After one sexual encounter Claire has decided that she wants to spend the rest of her life with Ethan. The problem with that is, she’s kind of an irritating dork, and he only really slept with her in a moment of desperation. For much of the movie Williams goes for broad humor while unabashedly humiliating herself as Claire, and despite the fact that none of it is really high comedy, it works as a nice antidote to the smugness that exudes from the rest of the cast. She even gets a brief moment to act real and human, and does a nice job with it. If this movie didn’t have Krasinski quipping and looking put-upon and Williams taking one for the team, it might have been my least favorite film of all time. As is, they aren’t enough to keep it from being an absolute failure, but they are able to elevate it from atrocity to irritant: high praise indeed.
Everything else I have to say about Something Borrowed amounts mostly to a laundry list of complaints, but that can be fun, so let’s do it. I really hated all of the characters in this movie. The version of New York that they live in consists solely of parks and nightclubs, and nobody ever has to do any work. They are always talking about how they’re late for work, and how they have to get to work, but nobody ever actually goes. And somehow they all afford extravagant lifestyles. They live in gorgeous apartments, they have summer homes, they drive Land Rovers, and they drink pretty much 24 hours a day. All of their problems consist of being forced to choose one enviable lifestyle over another, and then getting all sad about it. Why do I have to be a lawyer when I want to be a teacher? Why do I have to live in Manhattan when I really want to live in London? I know that I’m attractive enough to get most anybody I want, but why can’t I have this one particular person? Cry me a river you whiny, selfish, unlikable yuppies. Watching them lie to each other, cheat on each other, and hurt the people who are supposed to be closest to them over and over again never really helps in making me sympathize with their plights either. We’re not five minutes into this film before somebody is sleeping with their best friend’s fiancé, and from that point until the end credits we don’t see a single person make a moral or just decision at any time. Well, except for the characters of Ethan and Claire, but they’re too inconsequential to the script to turn back the tide of evil. At some point, somewhere in the film’s second act, I became so disgusted with what an awful bunch of people all of the characters were that I got uncomfortable sitting there and watching them. Rachel is a whiny slime ball who is too busy feeling sorry for herself to realize that she’s hurting other people. Darcy is a thoughtless whirlwind of destruction who concerns herself with nothing other than where her next good time is coming from. Dex is so illogical in his actions that his character would only make sense if he were explained away as being a psychopath. If the last scene was him chopping everybody up and putting them in his trunk, then this movie might have redeemed itself. Unfortunately, it’s not. He mostly just wears khaki shorts and gets whatever he wants whenever he wants it while making funny faces that I think was supposed to be acting. Having one of the main characters be a murderer would actually be interesting, and that would ruin the astonishing magic act this film performs of having people do nothing but evil things for two hours and still somehow come across as completely boring blank pages. Abracadabra, Something Borrowed sucks.
That pretty much sums up why I hate the characters, so I guess it’s on to why I thought the story was so bad. If there’s one thing that the story did okay, it was to keep me guessing who was going to end up with whom by the end of the movie. But that doesn’t really matter when all I wanted was to see every one of them end up splattered all over the front grill of a Mack truck. And really, the only reason that it wasn’t easy to guess who would end up together was because the film had no moral compass and I couldn’t imagine a single end scenario that wouldn’t leave the audience with bad tastes in their mouths. So that’s faint praise. And there’s nothing else the script does well either. It doesn’t take very long to realize how crappy the writing in this thing is. One of the first things we get in the opening birthday party scene is a speech by Hudson’s character that exists for no reason other than to give us the backstory of who everyone is and where they stand. It was awkward, clunky, and felt like it came directly out of a book titled “How Not to Write Exposition”. From that point on things just go downhill as we jump around from character to character watching them make senseless decisions that are completely unrealistic and head scratching in their stupidity.
After Rachel and Dex sleep with each other they both instantly know that what they did is wrong and will really hurt their best friend/fiancé Darcy. You’d think that they might spend some time apart afterwards. Or maybe just bite the sin bullet and carry on with a lustful affair. Instead we get a ridiculous song and dance where they are constantly put in situations where the three of them have to be at the same place at the same time, and awkwardness always ensues. This might have made sense if the events they attend together came about by random chance or were previously made obligations, but Rachel and Dex willfully walk into them. Dex invites Rachel to spend a weekend in the Hamptons at a beach house with he and Darcy so that they can find some time to talk about their budding affair. And she accepts. I’ll say that again: she goes off to spend a weekend in a house with her best friend and her best friend’s fiancé, who she is sleeping with, so she and the fiancé can have some bonding time to explore their new relationship. And then, once that happens, shocker, the weekend turns out to be a disaster. But instead of learning their lesson about locking three people involved in an adulterous affair up in the same house for a weekend, they go off and do it again. Dex sends Rachel flowers apologizing for how bad the weekend went and asking her if she’s willing to give it another chance. Clearly the movie needed them to all be in the same place at the same time so that sparks could fly, but it didn’t even pick one of the million sensible ways that it could happen and use that instead. It was content to make all of its characters look like complete psychopaths so that it could manufacture drama.
Throughout the story that’s happening in the present we get flashbacks to Rachel and Dex when they were in law school. They are meant to let us know that the two of them kind of had a thing going back in the day, so somehow that makes the affair that they are having now reasonable and something worth rooting for. They don’t really work to achieve that goal though, and were absolutely needless. We got the gist of the fact that these two were the straight-laced, boring ones who belonged together. It’s not hard to realize that Darcy is the greedy usurper who ruined things and stole the man for herself. The only things that the flashbacks accomplish are continually breaking up the tension of the story happening in the present and making an already insufferable story longer than it needed to be. Any rising tension that came from people who are lying to each other eventually having to confront the fact that they liars and cheats, which might have made this an enthralling experience, constantly gets undercut by pointless flashback sequences before it can reach a boiling point. Consequently, when the confrontations finally do happen, you’ve long stopped caring about any of it in even a passing way.
By the time I got to the end of the third act, the only way this film could have wrapped up in a satisfying way for me would have been if Krasinski’s character burst in with an automatic weapon and mowed everybody down in a glorious bloodletting. The way that it chooses to end isn’t quite so satisfying. As a matter of fact, Something Borrowed ends in the most soulless and wrong way possible. And somehow, the movie clearly thinks that its resolution is the happy, satisfying one that everybody in the audience wants. Bad people being rewarded for cowardice and duplicity is the name of the game for this romantic comedy; and forget about the ending being treated as tragic, it’s not even shown to us as being bittersweet. In Something Borrowed’s eyes all of its characters have gotten what they want and the audience gets to walk out with their hearts warmed. Unless they remember the character of Ethan, who is the only remotely moral person in the story, and who gets completely dropped and forgotten about in the third act. Or if they have any semblance of sanity and an ounce of respect for their fellow man. As for me, I am sane, so I walked out of Something Borrowed crushed under the weight of it’s sad piano score and it’s ceaseless stupidity. This movie is a dipshit. I hate it so much it makes my teeth hurt.
