It’s just 24 hours out of a person’s life, but that can be a long, momentous and rather depressing time – as Ivan Denisovich will tell you. David Nicholls’s hugely loved bestseller One Day, whose distinctive orange jacket design adorns beaches and train-carriages all over the country, has now, unfortunately, been turned into a slushy, mawkish and weirdly humourless romance with a sub-Richard Curtis style and more endings than Lord of the Rings. The big emotional climax is unearned and the all-important high concept is now a bit blurred.
The point of the book is that each chapter gives us a snapshot update of the same two people on the same day every year: 15th July. Pretty Yorkshire lass Emma and handsome-yet-vulnerable smoothie Dexter spend the night together on this date in 1988, their graduation day at Edinburgh University. They never become a couple, but the story follows their twin lives on this day over the next 20 years: sometimes together, sometimes poignantly apart. It’s a terrifically neat idea on the page: on screen, little titles pop up to tell you which year we’re on, but without those, I frankly wonder whether anyone without previous knowledge of the book would particularly notice the "one day" organising principle. It looks much like any other movie storyline.
Brooklyn-born Anne Hathaway plays Emma, and there have been mutterings about her Yorkshire accent. Well, it’s not as terrible as all that. Compared with Josh Hartnett, who had to play a Keighley lad in the 1999 Brit comedy Blow Dry, Hathaway sounds like Geoff Boycott in drag. And Jim Sturgess is perfectly all right as Dex. Their relationship has some sweet touches. But the movie never has much space to breathe, and there are only one or two real laugh lines in the entire film.
I couldn’t help remembering Marc Webb’s flawed but interesting romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer, in which key days from a love affair between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are presented to us out of order: the shuffling technique defamiliarised the personae and gave the audience some perspective. (Perhaps back-to-front dramas such as Pinter’s Betrayal and François Ozon’s 5×2 do the same thing.) Well, this isn’t what One Day is about: each day comes in sequence, yet gradually incremental changes turn out to be easier and more enjoyably described in a book than dramatised in a film.
Rafe Spall and Romola Garai have supporting roles as people with whom Em and Dex dally while in denial about their romantic destiny, and they do a decent job, as does everyone else. But the day has not been seized.
