Accident Coverage

This summer, Entertainment Weekly magazine ran an article touting The 50 Best Movies You've Never Seen. Indeed, I'd only seen a tiny handful of them, and several of them sounded intriguing enough for me to add to my Netflix queue.

One was Happy Accidents, an indie romance starring Marisa Tomei and Vincent D'Onofrio, and featuring an unconventional premise. When a woman with a sad history of failed relationships takes a chance on a man she met randomly at the park one day, things start to look up. But then he confesses to her that he's actually a time traveler from nearly 500 years in the future. Now she must decide whether to keep focusing on the good parts of the relationship and entertain the fantasy, or to write him off like her many past exes.

A relationship movie is only as good as its couple. Tomei and D'Onofrio are both good actors individually, but they lack that spark as a couple that would really make the movie take off. The scenes in which Tomei's character interacts with her therapist are strangely more compelling, while D'Onofrio is at his most interesting when he's spouting off nonsense about how the world is different in the far future. Both of them invest in the movie's high concept, but neither quite made me invest in the relationship.

Ultimately, the movie seems more interested in playing games with the "is he telling the truth?" aspect of the plot than it is interested in pursuing the romance. And the movie doesn't ride the line of "is he telling the truth?" objectively enough to make the film very compelling just on that level. You're never really in doubt what will be revealed in the final act.

I may yet check out some other films from the magazine's list, though I'm disappointed that my first random pick didn't really pan out. I grade Happy Accidents a C-.