Friends with Benefits

I came to Friends With Benefits with the hope that writer-director Will Gluck would take aim at the romantic comedy with the same piquant, mischievous zeal he displayed in 2010’s Easy A, a film that earned him comparisons to such hallowed figures as Alexander Payne and John Hughes. And he does—for a while, at least. The film springs from the gate with a fun revisionist élan, promising to lay waste to the stale conventions that have long characterized the genre. A promise that, in the end, is sadly unfulfilled.

Attractive twentysomethings Dylan (Justin Timberlake) and Jamie (Mila Kunis) first meet as business associates—he’s a savvy web designer, she’s a spunky headhunter who lures him to New York to work for GQ. Both happen to be recovering from nasty breakups (he was dumped by a Jon Mayer obsessive, played by Emma Stone; her by a cloying slacker, played by Andy Samberg), and they bond over their shared exasperation with relationships and romance.

One night, wallowing in their mutual malaise over beer and pizza and an insipid rom-com (a fictitious film-within-a-film featuring uncredited Jason Segel and Rashida Jones), they hit on an idea: Why not use each other to sate our primal urges, without all the hassles and complications that committed relationships entail? (That this is the first time either has pondered cohabitation strikes me as a bit disingenuous: Both rank among the upper-percentile of desirable people; surely the notion might have at least briefly occurred to them before?)

The pack is formalized by an oath sworn over a iPad bible app (the film is gratuitously tech-chic, to the point of employing flash mobs as plot devices), and consummated in one of the film’s funniest scenes. Freed from any pretensions of romance, and from any fears of embarrassment or rejection, they approach the act from the perspective of two people seeking only to maximize their enjoyment. (He encourages her to look at it as a game of tennis.) They calmly recite their preferences, idiosyncrasies, and deal-breakers, like agents negotiating a contract; during the deed, they critique each others’ performance with utter candor, offering helpful guidance when it’s called for. (She shows particular disdain for a technique called “The Tornado.”)

They’re hanging out, they’re having sex; the only thing missing, obviously, is intimacy. It’s inevitable—at least in the peculiar moral universe inhabited by studio rom-coms—that one or both of them will come to crave it. And that’s when complications arise, both for Dylan and Jamie and for the filmmakers. Faced with two roads, Gluck opts to take the more-traveled one, and Friends With Benefits gradually—and disappointingly—yields to convention, affirming many of the rom-com tropes and clichés it initially seemed intent on skewering.

That the film is funny—wry and quick and (at least initially) irreverent—helps alleviate the let-down of its second-half surrender to formula. Kunis and Timberlake make for able verbal sparring partners their chemistry is real and their interplay natural and unforced. Accustomed to smaller roles and guest-hosting spots on SNL, Timberlake acquits himself nicely in Friends With Benefits, even if he at times appears outmatched by Kunis. I’m not quite prepared to forgive him for The Love Guru, but I’m getting there.