A Lot Like Love (2005)

A Lot Like Love arrives from 2005, a year when the romantic comedy still believed in the long game. Nigel Cole's film follows Oliver and Emily across seven years and several airports, structured as chapters at turning points, and it asks the audience to wait patiently while two people fail to notice what is obvious. The screenplay by Colin Patrick Lynch owes a visible debt to When Harry Met Sally, a debt critics at the time noted with some irritation. Roger Ebert placed it among his most hated films. Manohla Dargis found it pleasant. Both reviews are accurate.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a mostly empty ledger. The cast includes Kal Penn as Oliver's business partner, along with several performers of color in small roles, and the film never remarks on any of it. This is mid-2000s ensemble casting, incidental and unexamined. Amanda Peet's Emily works as a photographer and pursues her career with some determination, which grants her a degree of professional agency, though the film has no argument to make about gender and no interest in making one. Oliver's diaper delivery startup is framed as an admirable entrepreneurial gamble, and the film regards his eventual success as a reward for faith rather than a subject for scrutiny. There is no environmental thread, no engagement with body image, no neurodivergent character, no historical revisionism, and no LGBTQ presence of any kind. The film does not lecture. It has nothing to say and says it at feature length.

That absence is, in its way, a kind of purity. A Lot Like Love is a lightweight courtship comedy that wants only to be charming, and it mostly fails at that because the leads lack the material. We are left with a specimen of a vanished mode, harmless, unambitious, and culturally inert.