We live in a cynical time, but I hope an intelligent film with a happy ending can find critical and commercial success.

The Phoenix Film Festival closed Thursday night with the U.S. premiere of Stuck in Love, a surprisingly upbeat story about a hyper-literary family dealing with the fallout from divorce. I am a fan of the dialogue-heavy films directed by Whit Stillman in the 1990s (Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco). Stuck in Love reminded me a bit of those, but the characters are more likable and the lines less pretentious.

Sam

I’d never seen actress Lily Collins (The Blind Side) before but … wow. Just wow!

Lily Collins

When her face first appeared on screen, I thought perhaps she’d been cast because she looks like a younger version of Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind), who plays her estranged mother. By the film’s midpoint, I’d begun to think Connelly was cast because she resembled a more-mature version of Collins.

Collins – daughter of musician Phil Collins – plays Samantha “Sam” Borgens, the 19-year-old daughter of novelist William Borgens (Greg Kinnear). When she’s not away at college, she stays in a house by the shore with her father and high-school-age brother, Rusty (Nat Wolff). Her mother left her dad for another man two years earlier.

Sam’s idea of “moving on” is cutting off contact with mom, even though indulging her anger really is the opposite of moving on. It’s clinging to the past. Afraid of getting hurt like her father, Sam also pre-empts any chance for love. Armed with a philosophical rationale based upon her parents divorce, she approaches dumb, good-looking guys in clubs for meaningless sex. “We both want to go back to your room, have sex and never see each other again,” she tells one.

A Place at the Table

Yet it’s her father who is told constantly to move on – by his ex-wife, his daughter, even his married sex buddy, Tricia  (Kristen Bell from Veronica Mars and Forgetting Sarah Marshall). His response: She’ll come back. In the meantime, he prowls around his ex-wife’s home and peeps through the window at her and her new husband, the man for whom she left him. When he celebrates holidays with his kids, he sets a place for her empty chair at the table.

Figuratively, the table is set for father, daughter and son to deal with their loves and losses. Their stories are launched early in the film, when Sam interrupts the family Thanksgiving with news that her novel is being published.

Rusty is non-plussed, seemingly annoyed that she’s beaten him to that milestone. The siblings have a bit of a rivalry and bicker repeatedly about the merits of Stephen King, who has a voice cameo later in the film.

William, on the other hand, is thrilled – until Sam drops the other shoe: It’s not the novel on which he’d consulted. It’s one she wrote the previous summer without telling him.

Eventually father and son come around, apologizing to Sam and congratulating her on the accomplishment, but not before William tells Rusty that he hasn’t “lived” enough and it’s holding back his writing. Dad, you see, has been having his kids keep journals since they were little in the hope that it will make them writers too. William tells Rusty that Sam has been more courageous in living her life. “She’s promiscuous, Dad,” he retorts. “That’s not the same thing.”

Rusty

Rusty has been the chaste one – pining for a classmate, Kate (Liana Liberato), who of course dates a boorish jock (Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver). He even writes a poem that mentions an angel inspired by her. He is embarrassed when their teacher makes him read it to the class, but later she seeks him out in the hallway to tell him she liked it.

Wolff delivers a nuanced portrayal of Rusty, moving from boyhood to manhood but still in a formative state. His Rusty is firm enough to move ahead but pliable enough deal with both parents (unlike Sam) – as well as the high-school fishbowl in which he and Kate swim.

Emboldened by his father’s advice, Rusty talks his friend Jason (Spencer Breslin, brother of Abigail) into crashing a house party for the popular crowd. They get in the door by bringing a bag of weed. Indeed, my one big disappointment with the film is its casual acceptance of marijuana use among teens.

While looking for Kate upstairs, he catches a glimpse of her snorting a line of cocaine. (Guess that explains why her nose was bleeding in an earlier classroom scene.) The clear implication is that coke is not okay like pot.

Rusty is disillusioned and ready to leave, but a quarrel breaks out between Kate and her boyfriend. Rusty becomes her knight in shining armor – punching out the jock – and they flee the party. Before the night is over, Rusty and Kate are together – though it’s clear she’s no angel. Before they kiss goodnight, she asks if she was the angel in the poem. He says yes; they kiss; and she says, oddly, “I think you’re going to be good for me.”

Liberato’s interpretation of Kate is subtle: smoldering and confident in her sexuality but not overly sexualized; damaged emotionally but functioning; and steady in purpose but gentle to Rusty.

Kate may not be literary, but she can read Rusty like a book. He’s gained some confidence after rescuing her, but it’s frail. More experienced in all the things that worry parents of teenagers, she uses her sexuality and his innocence to seduce him. She has a good heart, though, and is careful not to puncture his newfound self-esteem. A relationship develops, his first love, but people in recovery can slip back into their old ways. Could they survive this as a couple? As Kate later tells Rusty in a letter: “I hoped that you would fix me. Now I see that I have to fix myself.”

William

Kinnear has proven his acting chops in films such as Sabrina, As Good as it Gets and Little Miss Sunshine. His William is perhaps Stuck in Love‘s least conflicted character even though he as at the heart of the family conflict.

For a man who filmgoers are led to believe can’t get over his ex-wife, he has healthy relationships with his kids, never denigrating their mother. Like Sam, he has maintenance sex without love; but unlike her, he has it with just one person and it’s grounded in friendship. In one of the movie’s funnier scenes, sex partner Tricia helps ready him for his first real post-divorce date – with another woman.

William’s biggest challenge isn’t his feelings for his ex-wife – they are solid – it’s drawing the line between nurturing his loved ones and controlling them. That is why he’s so put off by Sam’s writing switcheroo.

Lou

Lou who?

Sam’s nocturnal prowling is interrupted by a classmate named Lou, played by Logan Lerman (The Perks of Being a Wallflower). Another aspiring writer, Lou calls out Sam for her hiding from emotional involvement by hooking up with random himbos.

His strategy is to stimulate her brain, whether she likes it or not. She rebuffs him repeatedly, but he is persistent – enough so that when he stops, Sam is compelled to seek him out. What she finds is a guy in a situation the opposite of hers: Lou has a close, loving relationship with a mother who is dying.

The shell around Sam’s heart begins to crack. Before we know it, she is introducing her “boyfriend” to her father. Their sea of love, however, contains an iceberg: their opposing feelings for their mothers.

Relationships & Resolutions

In my family, my father’s side had a slightly insensitive way of referring to members of the biological nuclear family as “in-laws” and spouses/significant others as “outlaws.” (My mother still grumbles about it, even though all those folks are dead.)

As Stuck in Love unfolds, its version of the outlaws – Kate, Lou and estranged mom Erica – commit acts that force the movie’s three romantic subplots to climax. It’s a clever bit of plot construction. Even though I’ve already leaked word of a happy ending, the resolutions of the individual subplots remain unclear. Two end happily; the other with just the potential for happiness. It’s worth seeing the film to find out which goes where.

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Tags: Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, Kristen Bell, Liana Liberato, Lily Collins, Logan Lerman, Nat Wolff, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Phoenix Film Festival, Stephen King, Still in Love, The Blind Side