When you’re young and in love, “forever” is a word you dare to carve in tree trunks or wedding cakes. Getting older, if you’re not careful, that same word could mean a purgatory of codependence. Such is the wry wisdom of Celeste and Jesse Forever, a romantic comedy whose main characters spend the duration figuring out what the audience already knows: not that they belong together, but that breaking up is hard to do.
For the eponymous L.A. couple played by Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg, directed by Lee Toland Krieger, the courtship phase occurred long ago. Now they’re just two great friends in a failed starter marriage. As obvious as it is that things won’t work out between Celeste the careerist and Jesse the aimless artist, it’s equally obvious that they’re inseparable. Even after announcing the divorce, they’re still hanging out together, avowing mutual love, running unabashedly through their familiar repertoire of inside jokes, and seriously weirding out their friends (Ari Graynor and Eric Christian Olsen).
To clarify, Celeste points out, “I love Jesse dearly but he doesn’t have a checking account. Or dress shoes. The father of my children will have a car.” He isn’t much help with assembling her IKEA furniture in any functional way, but he knows how to turn it into a robot sculpture. Yet, as soon as another woman (Rebecca Dayan) appears in Jesse’s life, and he suddenly seems ready for adult responsibility, Celeste reconsiders, albeit indignantly. It’s a complicated bundle of feelings, and Jones nails it.
A professional trend forecaster (she’s written a book called Shitegeist), Celeste is accustomed to rattling off pop-cultural pronouncements, and it shows in her withering dismissal of a sweet but slightly unhip financial analyst (Chris Messina) who hits on her in a yoga class. The scene is ingeniously played, a gender reversal of the similar business put over by Woody Allen in Annie Hall, to which Carol Kane famously responded, “That was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.” Here, Messina’s character duly allows Celeste’s appraisal of him, admitting that in fact he only took the class to meet girls. Later, it takes an obnoxious young pop star (Emma Roberts) to call her on her habit of “contempt prior to investigation.”
Jones co-wrote the Celeste and Jesse script (with actor Will McCormack, who appears here, amusingly, in a supporting role), and she has created an opportunity for herself, to affirm not just her beauty and on-screen appeal, already obvious, but also the range of her emotional intelligence. Accordingly it’s more Celeste’s movie than Jesse’s, and Samberg, for his part, seems relatively and shrewdly subdued; we may say this film better justifies his departure from “Saturday Night Live” than That’s My Boy. Although not without a few rom-com clichés, it’s also authentic and self-aware, evidently aspiring to the highest standards of the genre. Silly and messy, as you’d expect, and also sad and true.
Celeste and Jesse Forever/R, 89 minutes/Regal Downtown Mall 6
Playing this week
2016 Obama’s America
Regal Downtown Mall 6
The Bourne Legacy
Carmike Cinema 6
Brave
Regal Seminole Square 4
Celeste and Jesse Forever
Regal Downtown Mall 6
The Campaign
Carmike Cinema 6
The Dark Knight Rises
Regal Seminole Square 4
Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
Dog Days
Regal Seminole Square 4
The Expendables 2
Carmike Cinema 6
Hit and Run
Regal Downtown Mall 6
Hope Springs
Regal Downtown Mall 6
Ice Age: Continental Drift
Regal Downtown Mall 6
Lawless
Carmike Cinema 6
Marvel’s The Avengers
Regal Seminole Square 4
Moonrise Kingdom
Regal Downtown Mall 6
The Odd Life of
Timothy Green
Carmike Cinema 6
The Oogieloves in the
Big Balloon Adventure
Regal Seminole Square 4
ParaNorman
Carmike Cinema 6
The Possession
Regal Seminole Square 4
Premium Rush
Regal Downtown Mall 6
Sparkle
Carmike Cinema 6
Ted
Regal Seminole Square 4
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Vinegar Hill Theatre
Movie houses
Carmike Cinema 6
973-4294
Regal Downtown
Mall Cinema 6
979-7669
Regal Seminole Square Cinema 4
978-1607
Vinegar Hill Theatre
977-4911