When Brian Bloom spots her, it’s purely love at first sight as he crosses the street toward the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. More a magazine-cover caricature than a character of the flesh-and-blood variety, Arielle (Berenice Marlohe, Skyfall) will consistently stymie this well-meaning but insipid rom-com.
She’s first of all French, we’re insistently reminded. The 5 to 7 of the title refers to the aren’t-we-sophisticated Gallic tolerance for regimented affairs within ostensibly healthy marriages, apparently conducted during dinner hours. However, the married mother of two is no more than a cardboard cut-out so we have trouble rooting for her.
Brian (Anton Yelchin) is hardly any more inspiring. Intended to hold up the American end of the bargain–a faltering moralistic yang to Arielle’s boldly glib yin, Bloom yields intermittent witticisms unfortunately copiously buttressed with banal proclamations. Arielle may fancy herself sophisticated but her tolerance for the sophomoric behavior of Bloom kills any confidence we have in her.
In a film where Arielle and her spouse’s respective lovers get invited to the same dinner party at their Upper East Side Bonfire of the Vanities-style townhouse it’s not enough to merely dangle absurdity. No, director Victor Levin also somehow feels compelled to include Julian Bond and Daniel Bouloud as dinner guests. Their presence adds absolutely nothing to the film except their names. And when Bloom, a struggling writer who receives a sudden break after meeting a hotshot young editor (Olivia Thirlby) at the dinner, then attends a totally phony-feeling celebration once the New Yorker accepts a story of his for publication, it’s real-life New Yorker editor David Remnick who miraculously appears in the film.
None of this excess is exactly totally out of place. Not when none other than Glenn Close and Frank Langella come marching into the film as Bloom’s Jewish parents. All bets are off once Close asks a waiter at the Carlyle Hotel if he could replace her uncomfortable chair–with a folding chair! Since he can’t, she informs him, “I’ll stand.” Which she actually does until the at-first devastating news hits her that her beloved son is having an affair with a married woman. Naturally, within a few minutes she’s planning on going shopping with her new pal, the French girl.
Langella is his usual excellent self in playing off both his eccentric wife and his equally bizarre son. Yet even he can’t save things, when (spoiler alert!) Bloom decides to ask Arielle to marry him. Here the film veers off to what seem like at least a dozen different endings. If Pinocchio were around, each subsequent climax would have challenged even his capacity for appendage swelling.
By the film’s very end, we’re asked to forgive its many screenplay difficulties in favor of a sentimental generalization: all great art can be attributed to suffering, specifically a love object in the artist’s past who has never been properly reconciled. Even if you buy that, this film does less to convince you it’s worth the struggle in the end and more to give you a serious shoulder shrug.