Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

Seeking is one of those films that works and you are not really sure why. The characters and plot feel typical and cliché, nothing here we haven’t seen before. Keira Knightley is playing to type: cute and charming with just enough quirk to make her interesting. Steve Carell is doing the same: perpetually middle-aged and emotionally stunted everyman, who is somehow irresistible to cute, charming women. However, the fact that everyone in this film is going to die makes their rom-com hijinks darkly funny and endearing rather than trite.

After a mundane radio broadcast announcing the failure of a last ditch effort to stop a giant asteroid from colliding with Earth, insurance salesman Dodge (Carell) is promptly left by his wife. Only three weeks are left before the world’s untimely demise, but Dodge and several lost souls continue on with life in roughly the same manner as before (going to work, the gym, buying window cleaner, etc.). Others carry on in a way we are more familiar with, living out their hedonistic desires and/or going crazy… but their stories have been covered in plenty of movies before and are only used here for comedic affect. Although they only know each other in passing, Dodge’s neighbor, Penny (Knightley), crashes at his place after a fight with her boyfriend. When a looting mob makes their way to the neighborhood, Dodge and Penny take off in her car on a combined mission to find his college sweetheart and get her back to the UK. The journey is more important than the destination, and the film is sprinkled with funny and heartfelt vignettes of the odd couple’s adventures together. Some sequences work better than others (and one in particular seems like an afterthought), but it’s effective as a whole. The movie has a great supporting cast who get enough screen time to drop a few good lines.

Seeking is not a crazy apocalyptic action/thriller about the end of days; it’s a comment on the way we live our lives, existing day to day pretty much the same out of habit or some sense of obligation. Fear is the driving force in relationships; fear of being alone, of not finding the right one, and of not being good enough. No one really does or says what they want and is scrambling to somehow make it all happen before the end. What are the things and people which truly have meaning, and which are merely filler? The major problem with this movie is that it can’t seem to figure out what it wants to be. On one hand it’s a Hollywood (dark) romantic comedy; then it feels more like an indie flick searching for a way to express this deeper meaning. The fact that it moves back and forth between these two types, straddling the line between rehashed drivel and profound emotional expression, is what makes the film interesting. While the movie is far from perfect, it’s entertaining and hits heartwarming hot spots. You get the best of both worlds: penis and heroin jokes, and genuinely touching moments about discovering the things that really matter.

SaveSave