Happiness for Beginners

I'm starting to think no book adaptation should be less than 2 hours long. Especially a slow burn romance. There just wasn't enough time to flesh out their relationship. It felt forced and unearned (even more so because we only got one scene from their collective past to support Jake's undying love.) And why did they age up the actors so far?! Ellie is almost 10 years older than the book character and Luke is almost 20 (!!) years older. It made some of their childish bickering even harder to watch. The side characters were a hoot and well developed (but it came from a book so duh!) Something about the dialogue or maybe the pacing was just off. Maybe another 20-30 mins could have filled it out more.

I love Luke Grimes and watched this for him, and he is tender and sweet and lovable, but his co-lead is badly miscast with Kemper. She's great in other things, but she is not a believable love interest for Grimes and her character is irksome, at best, almost throughout, with only momentary glimpses of redemption. The screenplay, adapted from a book, fails to portray her character growth alongside him, fails to show enough of their shared moments prior to THE HIKE, and indeed seems to leave out a lot of the most inspirational stuff from the book itself. If this screenwriter had some childish concept that she was a better writer than the book author, let us disabuse her of that silly notion. I liked the supporting cast, but they weren't fleshed out enough. At the end of the day, it was pretty to watch but Kemper was mostly very grating, the romance was unbelievable, and there wasn't enough material regarding how to be happy for this to truly feel like a feel-good flick. Only one character who brought up 3 things we're grateful for even seemed like a vague reference to the title, the book, and presumably the entire point. It seems a shame, bc the setting was so lovely and you had Grimes ON SET as well. They should have just shot him walking around on those trails sharing his personal thoughts...that would have earned a higher rating.

I sincerely feel like REI decided to sponsor a movie and started with the premise that we want to make a movie about a hiking/camping trip in the woods so we can feature all of our popular brands. Then they tried to assign it some kind of emotional meaning about hiking with a purpose to find yourself again. It wouldn't be Hollywood without a couple known TV actors to weave in a romantic narrative right out of the rom com playbook. Of course she doesn't like the obvious guy who would only be pathetic enough to chase her in a bad romance novel. Exaggerated characters and boring story arc. This is not a good movie.