I'll Come Running (2008)

Memorable, crazy movie

Good start, but then it gets ruined

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

I normally don't review films I don't completely watch but felt compelled to add a quick comment. If a film features a lead who is obnoxious, make sure he's not so obnoxious that you turn off the movie. When this film began, the three Danish friends were so obnoxious and sanctimonious that I truly hated them. During their visit to Texas, they spent their time being boorish jerks--making fun of everything. And, the lead was worse because he announced that he's going back to Denmark because they place sucks.I travel a lot--far, far more than the average person. I've been to countries where I've heard terrible things about the locals and found them all to be extremely nice. In fact, that can be said about everywhere you go--everywhere. So, after only about 10 minutes, I just turned it off because it created a main character that was simply awful- -and so I didn't care about his romance or change of heart. I just wanted him to go home and shut up.

In a movie I thought was going to be a reinterpretation of "After Sunrise," a turn of events puts this indie feature into a new orbit. When a young man decides to stay in Austin while his Danish friends return home, he's placed in a strange culture. Luckily, a friendly waitress brings him home and they share a few enchanting, albeit cinematically forced days together.Later, through a dramatic plot twist, the waitress finds herself in Denmark is a similarly strange culture. However, it's even more difficult because she doesn't know the language.I was pleasantly surprised that the pacing matched the mood of the events. Slow and steadily you begin to sense that this is more about finding your place in the world than any singular event.Kudos to have the guts make a non traditional, yet satisfying indie feature.

Life is messy, in ways that are both beautiful/magical and wrenching/tragic and sometimes all at once. That is the overarching message I see in this film, not a new message but an artfully conceived version of it, with engaging acting and a script that starts out with a sense of lack of direction but, about 30 minutes into it, wondering if it was going somewhere, within 5 more minutes, I was hooked and saw the buildup as having been appropriate stage-setting for what followed, also in the circuitous path that life often takes. And in that circuitous and messy quality of life, the film hones in particularly on intensity - and how intensity of emotion catches us by surprise and sometimes can catapult us into emotional arcs we couldn't see coming and may not understand even as they beckon us. The central character travels two comparable but distinct arcs of intensity, arcs separated by an ocean but within a week's time lapse in which we watch her complex responses evolve in the context of these two passages through which she travels. In retrospect, it was the well-established sense of lack of direction in the film's first half hour which becomes part of the message overall - a sense of several characters (but two in particular and then a third) wandering, stumbling, happenstancing through their young-adult lives. Suddenly out of happenstance grows increasing sense of purpose which is at once bewildering and as if guided by inexplicable forces triggered and mapped by the power of connection – human, heartfelt (and yearning) connection. Sexual chemistry may be the entry point but the film is definitely about a stirring of the imagination and sense of (be)longing, a force that is seen as sometimes distrusted precisely because the entry point was sexual.In a way, the film can be seen as an exploration of the "If only..." kind of regret that some express (or fear) at life's end ("If only i'd followed my heart at such-and-such a crossroads....") where the 3 central characters reflect slightly different takes on what may happen when you do follow your heart at such points. The consequences are poignant and life-altering, also in different senses for each character. Yet in each case, these three make key decisions, ones that feel vital, in the direction of connection and imagination. The last time we see each of these three, it seems their heart and their realization of who they are and what they thirst for, what their life's priority is, has expanded.A crucial exclamation point to this message, for me, came across as we see that same power- of-connection-and-imagination play out in the eyes of the youngest protagonist in the film. When the oldest central protagonists, the parents, have their bubble burst and retract in a sense of betrayal that their willingness to believe and to follow a certain idealism and wishfulness of spirit has been deceived, their young son does not follow suit and, in his yearning to still believe that magical connection is real and realizable, he gives expression, bodily, literally, to the titular message exemplified by the three central protagonists in their early adulthoods - namely, that with or without full understanding of what impels them, we see them opt to go running (after a dream-of-sorts they didn't know they had but responded to a powerful glimpse of) - running where the messy intensities of their human connections, where the triumph of belief over doubt, for however long, leads them. (But let me finish by noting that this review ties too neat a bow, it should be messier than this.)

This is a very insightful film about impetuousness, sex, and the unique ability that sex has to cause people to mistake it for love, a phenomenon especially prevalent among the young.The film centers on a slightly-naifish Texas waitress who hooks up with a cynical but lovable Danish tourist. They satisfy the powerful sexual energy between them over a few days, and then a plot twist turns the girl's world upside down. As a result, the waitress makes a series of improbable and extremely irresponsible decisions that lead her on a journey to Denmark. As often happens, the bad decision making just keeps compounding and, by the end, the entire affair turns into a monumental train wreck.When I say "improbable" I include a few plot twists that are not really plausible in terms of the time line. But no matter. The characters are likable and the story compelling, so maybe viewers will not notice until they think about the movie afterwords.The movie works because the waitress is transformed by the experience and finally becomes able to sort out the differences between passionate sexual attraction and real love, which can only be conferred through a lasting relationship. In the last minute of the movie, the waitress makes her first good, responsible decision in the entire film, and that makes the journey worth the investment.