TROUBLED FORMULA, GOOD CHEMISTRY

Review by David Guglielmo

If I believed in guilty pleasures, I might call THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS one. Its setup—a female doctoral student and male professor fake a romantic relationship, he to get his contract renewed and she to push her best friend toward the guy she originally liked—sounds like the recipe for a classic screwball comedy of the sexes. Never mind that the central conceit makes little sense (apparently, having a girlfriend is enough to convince the university board that he’s no longer a flight risk?). However, the movie inverts the traditional battle-of-the-sexes dynamic so completely that it somehow circles back on itself, seemingly without realizing it.

He is a tyrant, with the moniker “Dr. Evil” among his students. They live in fear of being kicked out of the program for a single mistake, and we are meant to assume that Tom Bateman, the strapping British actor who plays the role (with a convincing American accent), is the “straight man” to Lili Reinhart’s “madcap heroine.” Except there’s nothing madcap, free-spirited, or even remotely eccentric about Reinhart’s character, unless you consider ordering a sugary drink instead of black coffee, or enjoying M&M’s, enough to make her an agent of chaos. What ends up happening, because she is so socially conventional, is that he becomes so stiff, so emotionally rote by comparison, that it becomes funny, and he ends up being the socially unconventional one.

Essentially, it’s another ANYONE BUT YOU, but set at an Ivy League university. Except that movie uses the enemies-to-lovers formula, whereas in this one, though he’s hated by the other students, he is never mean to our protagonist. He’s actually kind to her from their first meeting. And unlike in ANYONE BUT YOU, the tone never reaches the heights of its screwball premise because there simply aren’t enough antics.

Instead, it’s all very EMILY IN PARIS—if Emily were trying to cure pancreatic cancer. Unlike the heroine of, say, BABY BOOM, whose comedy is drawn from her ambition and neurosis, Reinhart’s character is never really given anything to challenge her own worldview. She doesn’t have an arc because she was never set up for one.

But somehow it works and is funny. Maybe not laughing funny, but smiling funny. Reinhart is exceptionally beautiful and likable—adorable, really—and Bateman commits fully to the comic stiffness of the role. It’s that chemistry that keeps the movie—which has no business being two hours—thoroughly enjoyable and charming almost the whole way through.

If the movie were cut down to its proper length of an hour and a half, I’d suggest removing nearly every scene with the roommate or the other students, including a party sequence you’ll want to fast-forward through (why these Gen Zers have a poster for the 1941 noir I WAKE UP SCREAMING under its alternate title, THE HOT SPOT, for any reason other than that it was sitting in the MGM prop house and didn’t need to be cleared is beyond me). It’s only when our two leads are together that the movie reminds us how movie-star good looks and charisma will keep us glued to almost any flat script.

Late in the film, we get a surprisingly lengthy sex scene—which triple-checks its consent to avoid any controversy whatsoever regarding the power dynamics—that seems suited to a more adult film than the one we’ve been watching for the previous hour and a half. But I’m not complaining. What I will take umbrage at is a third-act crisis in which the Harvard lab professor she’s been trying to land a job with gets cartoonishly evil and explicitly tells her she’ll need to fuck him to get the position, slapping a “Me Too” message onto a movie that existed perfectly well as fluff.

David Guglielmo is a casting director, filmmaker, and lifelong student of film. He writes about films because he loves them.