How to Be Single (2016)

How to Be Single arrives in 2016 with a title that promises instruction and a runtime that delivers a group of women in New York variously negotiating one-night stands, sperm donors, and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Dakota Johnson's Alice leaves a college boyfriend to find herself, Rebel Wilson's Robin finds herself in a rotation of strangers, and Leslie Mann's Meg, an OB/GYN, decides to have a baby alone. The film is adapted from Liz Tuccillo's novel and was directed by Christian Ditter with the visual grammar of a shampoo commercial. It is pleasant. It is also, for all its talk of self-discovery, a film that keeps checking its watch.

The critical consensus identified the outline of a progressive romantic comedy here, and the outline is real. The women are not punished for enjoying sex, which for the genre in 2016 counted as a quiet act of courage. Meg pursues single motherhood without hand-wringing. Damon Wayans Jr. plays Alice's love interest and the film treats his race as thoroughly irrelevant, which reviewers applauded and which is precisely the point: the casting is diverse, the engagement with that diversity is nonexistent. There is no racial consciousness to speak of, no queer presence at all, and no interest in class beyond the comfortable affluence of people who can afford to be lonely in Manhattan. The movie gestures toward independence and then hands its heroine a cab chase and a wedding.

Rebel Wilson's Robin is confident, sexually active, and presented as desirable without commentary, a modest act of casting generosity that the script never bothers to develop. Beyond that, the ledger is bare. No climate anxiety, no anti-capitalist stirrings, no neurodivergent characters, no history to revise, and no sermonizing worth the name. The film wants to say something about being alone and settles for saying something about being fine. It is the cinematic equivalent of a friend who texts back three days later.