Director: Michael Showalter
Stars: Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Anne Hathaway
Yesterday morning I wrote and posted my review of the contentious Tom Cruise movie Digger, giving it a cagy 5/10 score, then I was promptly off back to the multiplex for Verity. When I came out, after a short deliberation, I amended the Digger review and bumped it up to a 6/10. Sometimes you really have to be reintroduced to the bottom of the barrel in order to truly appreciate the middle. Perhaps I needed Verity so I could internally recalibrate again. Because Jesus.
It’s my own fault, to a certain extent. I went into this relatively blind. Having half paid attention to the trailer a couple of times I was up for some high-camp cattery between Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett in a glossy paperback thriller adaptation. Something throwaway but devilishly fun. What I’d failed to notice is that this is pulled from the pages of a Colleen Hoover potboiler. I’d successfully avoided the critically mauled run of adaptations that have run through multiplexes like potholes over the past 18 months. I ran straight into this one.
Starting ‘One Year Later’ than effectively nothing, we meet modestly successful author Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) at a disengaged bookstore read for her latest offering. Following a decidedly grim meet-cute with Josh Hartnett’s Jeremy Crawford, Lowen discovers he is husband and publishing lawyer to the reclusive but mega-successful thriller novelist Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), whose book series The Noble Virtues Lowen is offered to help finish because Verity has been involved in a car accident. Intrigued more by Jeremy than the lucrative ghost writing proposal, Lowen decamps to their remote lakeside home in Vermont to start going through Verity’s notes. It is only on arrival that she learns the true extent of Verity’s injuries; she is effectively in a waking coma, cared for dutifully by a nurse named Anna (Irina Dvorovenko).
While snooping for insights, Lowen discovers a USB stick containing Verity’s secret memoirs, So Be It, which act as a framing device going forward for a succession of flashbacks documenting how she and Jeremy met, courted 9 1/2 Weeks style, and had their two children (one of whom, Harper, died in a boating accident the year before). Thus Lowen starts to spiral at the ‘revelations’ contained in this circumspect manuscript. Suddenly she sees Verity glancing at her, even walking around the house… while she still casually accepts Jeremy’s advances and has unintentionally funny bisexual nightmares.
If this sounds enjoyably silly, trust me, it isn’t. Director Michael Showalter follows his Hollywood kindred spirit Paul Feig out of the realms of successful comedy (for Showalter The Big Sick) into the highly profitable market of slick crime melodrama, but likewise struggles to find material worth the transition. Verity makes The Housemaid look like rapturously giving entertainment, however. Spaciously void of mystery or intrigue, it holds on to blatantly obvious revelations as though they’re devilish twists buried in the woodwork of the lakehouse. It’s an agonising 90 minutes before we get anywhere, and when the film does start tipping it’s hand with information made clear in the goddamn trailer, the battle for our interest has long been lost.
This is passionless in every sense. Johnson – whose acting choices have received harsh scrutiny over the years – is quite unfortunately handed a line where Lowen describes herself as having “resting bored face”. Who can blame her though, when there’s so little to work with. I’m struggling to make it through a few hundred words on the subject. I’m mystified that something this thin was whittled down from book size to fill two hours. There’s so little to get to grips with. It feels stretched out. Painfully padded for a second act that simply isn’t there. Through Lowen’s reactions the movie does it’s conservative signally at the things we ought to be disgusted by (stigmatising and trivialising complicated issues like post natal depression in the process), while notions of steaminess in this deeply unbizarre love triangle are thin and easily seen through. Even Fifty Shades had more meat on the bone. At least Hathaway has a reason to look so desperately vacant.
Verity grew so prodigiously banal that it started having the same effect as certain ambient music that I tend toward at bedtime when my mind feels too active. It became a sort of tranquil noise through which I could fade out and start lucidly sorting my own thoughts and feelings collected that day. I had to consciously pull myself back into the headspace of being in the multiplex and in front of something to focus on.
Sleepily predictable throughout, laced with tiresomely trite dialogue and home to a risibly stupid murder plot that makes almost no sense whatsoever, Verity gives rise to the conclusion that Lowen and Jeremy are two of the least intelligent characters we’ve been asked to spend time with all year. Is that deliberate? Is Hoover’s writing this bad? Has something incredibly interesting simply been lost in translation? I can’t tell you.
What I can tell you is that Beats Headphones are the ones to wear when you get spattered with blood that looks like it was fired from a tomato puree gun. I can tell you Sean Evans’ Hot Ones gets some cringeworthy free advertising. And I can tell you that going to see Verity is ultimately about as exciting as watching someone else read a novel.
Go see Digger, at least it asks you to feel something about it.
