I love Anne Hathaway, I really do. I thought it was her performance (amongst others) that lifted The Devil Wears Prada from being very average to a good film, I thought she was hysterical in The Princess Diaries and cannot wait to see her as Catwoman in the new Batman film. The problem is, in One Day she was just completely miscast. As a Northern girl, I was really looking forward to seeing who would be cast as the Leeds-born heroine, Emma Morley, and was surprised and a little miffed to hear it would be Miss Hathaway - reading the book I felt a real affinity for the podgy, Yorkshire, bespectacled, opinionated Emma, and have never felt anything of the kind for the stunningly beautiful, stick-thin, American Anne Hathaway.
I know that when Renee Zellweger was cast as Bridget Jones a similar fuss was made - what about the accent? What about being a bit overweight? What about looking like a NORMAL PERSON, not a Hollywood siren? The difference is that Renee Zellweger not only perfected the accent, she gained a lot of weight and somehow made herself look normal, winning round everyone that criticised her casting. Anne Hathaway, on the other hand, certainly cannot hide her beauty behind a pair of glasses and a bad wig - and nor can she do the accent. Admittedly, a regional Yorkshire accent must be much harder than the standard RP English voice, but she absolutely murders it; occasionally she nails the flattened vowels and glottal stops, but more often than not then slips into posh, clipped pronunciations, and once or twice wandered dangerously close to what seemed to be Welsh.
In her defence, Anne Hathaway does have a way with the one-liners, and certainly makes Emma a likeable - though not as ballsy as her literature counterpart - character. However, it is Jim Sturgess in the part of Dexter who really shines. Sturgess has the arrogant, public-school layabout absolutely nailed, and he somehow manages to make you feel sympathy for a son who loses his mother, irritation with an annoying TV presenter, affection for a lost boy who needs his friend, exasperation with a repeatedly daft lush and attraction to a very charming ladies-man. There are so many layers to the character of Dexter that I actually felt Sturgess portrayed better than the book described. He evoked all the right emotions in all the right places, and had me in absolute floods of tears for the entire final fifteen minutes of the film. It would have been so easy to hate Dexter - and you do, for a while - and so hard to make the audience feel the sympathy and affection that (in the end) he deserves.
The plot itself follows these two characters from their first meeting on 15th July 1988, through the next twenty years, always finding them again on the anniversary of their first fumbled night - St Swithin's Day. I initially thought this meant the characters themselves meet up every July 15th but it doesn't - the viewer is simply shown every July 15th, whether Emma and Dex are together, apart, friends, in dramatic circumstances or living through everyday tedium. It's actually much more interesting that way, and it's a real experiment in characterisation to see what happens to these two friends over twenty years.
The chemistry between Sturgess and Hathaway, I thought, was actually very good. More important than the staggered, eventual romance of the two (for me) was their friendship, and they played it beautifully. I liked the way the book had been adapted (often risky when the author writes the screenplay), staying true to the story but cutting out one or two of the more unappealing sub-plots.
Basic summary: A touching, funny depiction of romance, growing up and - most importantly - friendship. It falls down here and there, but One Day essentially a sweet and endearing rom-com, with a little more to it than the churned-out American chick flicks.
Rating: * * * * (very good)
