Valentine’s Day may be a rather silly holiday, but it is a wonderful excuse to celebrate love and romance in the movies. In that spirit, check back each day leading up to February 14th for a cinematic advent calendar of recommendations presented as mini-reviews.
Day 13: Plus One (2019)
Dir. Jeff Chan & Andrew Rhymer
Maya Erskine, Jack Quaid
Logline: Two single college friends staring down a stream of summer weddings vow to attend each as the other’s plus one so neither has to go to any event alone and discover along the way that there might just be more between them.
Why you should watch: Early in this series, on Day 2 to be exact, I wrote about my love for screwball comedies through Bringing Up Baby (1938). It’s a subgenre that has gone mostly out of style in the ensuing decades but nonetheless graces us when we least expect it. Plus One is not strictly screwball by any means. In fact, it bears just as much similarity to the wedding subgenre of romantic comedies embodied by Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) or My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), what with its almost exclusively weddings-based settings. Yet, if you spend any time thinking about the sublime two-hander carried out here by Maya Erskine and Jack Quaid, you cannot help but start to notice their embrace of what made Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn so fabulous in Baby. It is simply modulated to a modernized corner of the genre.
What I mean is that the Erskine-Quaid set-up is one of the chaos agent and the straight shooter. Erskine enlivens Alice as a wrecking ball of haywire humor, yet also motivated by fundamental goodness. Quaid on the other hand portrays Ben as a rather boring man convinced that his inability to commit is because he simply has high standards. Their crashing together at the first wedding is a circumstance of two people who were likely friends by circumstance in college now trying to decide if they make sense in the real world. Play that out over a series of weddings, and the two discover that no they don’t quite work as friends in the real world, rather because they seem destined to be more than that. Along the way, their dynamic codifies as one where Erskine lets her formidable comedic talents fly and Quaid evolves into the living nerve so embarrassed by her brashness, yet nonetheless as in love with her as we in the audience are. The movie lives and dies by their bedlam and chemistry, and really, it absolutely glows.
Erskine and Quaid on their own would be plenty to recommend Plus One, but like the best rom-coms, they are surrounded by an able and willing supporting cast ready to deliver their one or two scenes of hilarity or heart and then move on. The sum total is a thoughtful remix of archetypal genre concepts revitalized into one of the best rom-coms of the 21st Century.
Where you can watch: Streaming on Hulu. Rent on Apple, YouTube, and elsewhere.
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Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.
