The One I Love

In The One I Love a therapist sends a married couple with problems off to a private country retreat. There each discovers their partner understands them perfectly and says and does everything the other needs and wants. This is obviously science fiction.

Here’s the sci fi element. The couple Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elizabeth Moss) are perplexed when they encounter facsimiles of themselves (Elizabeth Moss, Mark Duplass) who embody everything each wants in their partner. For Ethan the New Improved Sophie makes bacon with his morning eggs. For Sophie the N.I. Ethan finally takes responsibility for his recent infidelity and begs her forgiveness. For both, the surrogate sex is great — as well as just being that long lost sex. 

It’s sci fi like A Midsummer Night’s Dream is sic fi — avant le lettre. Something supernatural irrupts the repressions and disguises to rearrange the way to love. It’s also like the recent Her (see blog) where a schmuck finds the perfect love in his cell phone voice. But she becomes so human she gives him all the problems he’d find in a real woman he tried to dominate. So the phenomenal doings here expose the current romantic reality. You get the erosion of love, mutual recriminations, the yearning for past selves and relationships, the impulse to betray, the distrust and anger — and this is a couple trying to make the marriage work. As they find in their anniversary dip in a stranger’s pool, it’s cold and disappointing because you can’t recreate the past. Nor recover the person you used to be or once married.

Joke One is the title. It’s a song phrase that doesn’t quite fit. The Two I Love would work, because Sophie finds herself also loving Ethan’s replica, who loves her. Knowing he can’t compete with that idealization of himself, Ethan tries to win back Sophie, even though he’d miss that bacon. But as the film — and our real life romantic and/or marital -- institutions remain phallocentric, against his intentions Ethan … spoiler alert … brings home the bacon. It’s a happy ending all around, because the false Ethan and real Sophie fell in love, so the real Ethan’s error gets the others what they want — and himself the ideal wife instead of the flawed he felt duty-bound to retrieve. The film doesn't settle for the heroine's loss of ideal lover in The Purple Rose of Cairo: ("Alright, so he's fictional. But nobody's perfect"). Here the couple both get to keep their fictional ideals.

Joke Two is the therapist. Casting Ted Danson — whose persona from Cheers on is of an amoral callous rake, despite his happy marriage to Mary Steenburgen (who’s heard as Ethan’s mom on a phone message) — alerts us to something shifty in the works. And sho nuff, he’s a mad genius running real couples through a cycle of lure and imprisonment. To be freed, a couple has to seduce another couple into staying there in their stead. It doesn’t make obvious sense but that’s sci fi.  Like marriage — or bachelorhood, for that matter — the idyllic retreat is a trap.
     This is a delightful debut by director Charlie McDowell, with eye-opening performances by Moss and Duplass. It brings the heft of modern psychology and counselling to the classic marriage/divorce comedy with if anything an increase in the fun.