Going the Distance (2010)

Going the Distance arrives from 2010, a vintage whose romantic comedies were already being pronounced dead by people paid to pronounce such things. Nanette Burstein directs Drew Barrymore and Justin Long through a long-distance arrangement conducted by webcam, phone sex, and frequent-flyer miles. The humor is raunchy and relentless, the kind that treats a dining-room-table encounter interrupted by a silent brother-in-law as a set piece rather than an embarrassment. The film never stops to sermonize. It is too busy making jokes about masturbation and awkward video calls to instruct anyone about anything, which leaves its messaging resting on incidental gestures alone.

A woman occupies the director's chair, and the screenplay treats its heroine's journalism career as a genuine stake instead of a decorative obstacle to be discarded at the altar. Erin's front-page story matters. Her Chronicle offer matters. When the couple separates, the split honors her ambition. That is a modest progressive sensibility, threaded through a framework that remains a conventional heterosexual courtship. The recession hovers at the edges. Garrett despises his record-label job, and the economy is described as shrinking, but nobody organizes a march. The cast is mostly white, with Natalie Morales in a supporting turn, and race never enters the conversation. Diversity here is weather, not policy.

The remaining categories offer nothing to report. No LGBTQ characters appear. No environmental concern surfaces. The bodies on display are the standard rom-com bodies, toned and unexamined. No neurodivergent character exists. There is no history to revise, this being a contemporary fiction about two people and their phone bills. This is a modest, funny, faintly melancholy comedy about logistics. The cultural agenda, such as it is, amounts to letting a woman keep her job. In 2010 that qualified as a statement. The bar has since moved.

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