During an early scene in Every Day, the debut feature of Nip/Tuck writer Richard Levine, an ostensibly rather pithy line of dialogue is spoken by Liev Schreiber’s hacky television writer Ned to his youngest son, Ethan (Skyler Fortgang). When the boy muses that he wouldn’t mind “being a flower,” his father reminds him that flowers “don’t live very long.” While Richard Levine may be of the belief that flowers do not live very long, I contend that they do. In fact, I would go so for as to wager that, in the vast majority of cases, flowers live forever.
But perhaps Levine is less a revisionist botanist than a basic cable-poet with a very specific type of flower in mind: one that has been picked. Of course, to think of all flowers — and there are a lot of them — as having been picked tends to limit the plant’s potential as a metaphoric device. This confusion regarding flowers that are picked from nature, and therefore in a perpetual state of decline, and those that prosper because they have yet to be picked tends to be a perpetual stumbling block for Every Day.
A prime example of this would be the film’s disparate handlings of the “touchy” themes of venial marital infidelity — in other words, affairs that, as is often the case in real life, do not always lead the summary dissolution of otherwise functioning marriages — and the relationships of openly gay teenagers and their parents — both of which are “from nature.” It’s disparate not only in tone but also in terms of empathy — for the characters and their predicaments — and, therefore, efficacy.
The latter narrative thread is handled quite reasonably and realistically: as befitting a middle-class television writer — whose boss Garrett (Eddie Izzard) is unstereotypically gay (though the fact that he is working in television could be seen as a separate stereotype) — Ned is less ashamed of his son Jonah (Ezra Miller)’s outness than he is genuinely concerned that the boy may be vulnerable to the opportuntistic advances of college-aged men at a gay and lesbian prom. Later in the film, Ned expresses concerns to his wife Jeannie (Helen Hunt) that her permissiveness touching the same subject may be one of confusion as to how to raise a gay son rather than an expression of loving acceptance. This confusion materializing itself in Ned as a general awkwardness and reluctance to broach the subject with family friends.
On the other hand, Ned’s affair with coworker Robin (Carla Gugino) is handled in a fashion that can only be described as clumsy: from the moment the character is introduced — smoking a joint in front of the television studio, seemingly waiting for Ned — the viewer knows exactly what will follow, an effect heightened by the fact that, as an actress, Gugino is incapable of “concealing her hand.” Ned is summoned to Robin’s sexualized bachelorette pad so she can help him make his script sexier. So while in the relationship dynamic of Jonah, Jeannie, and Ned, we find a flower “of the sort” that does live for a long time, that of Ned and Robin simply cannot. And because Robin’s role is unsympathetic, Ned’s attraction to her is even less sympathetic, calling into question the sensibility of Jeannie’s choice to forgive him, which I mention not because I think Ned is a “jerk,” but because I can’t believe it was Levine’s intention to leave his “sweet little film” without any sense of closure.
Levine has made something of a strange choice in situating the show for which Ned writes as a parody of Nip/Tuck, though it seems more apologetic than self-deprecatory as it depicts the show’s script development process as little more than a couple of people sitting around a table cooking up sleazy plot twists: “anal is the new oral” is a recurring mantra. Another problem with the marital infidelity angle: the film doesn’t really explore Jeannie and Ned’s marital issues with any significant depth — more specifically, it is their “bedroom dynamic” that is neglected. Disagreements regarding parenting of Jonah and “daughtering” of Jeannie’s suicidal father Ernie (Brian Dennehy) are confronted more directly, so the viewer is left to work out just what has led him to cheat, and not only cheat but allow himself to be not once but twice drawn into the clearly demarcated web of a comically exaggerated stock-homewrecker.
Ernie’s “B-story” — the film is, unsurprisingly, structured a lot like a television pilot — is something of a mixed bag. While Brian Dennehy brings a certain grunting, drooping, slovenly realism to his depiction of Ernie’s physical deterioration, and while his highly detailed physical embodiment of a bitter cynic with suicidal ideations is above reproach, he may be portraying a character a little too flowery of speech for his gruff sensibilities. His brief lecture to aspiring violinist Ethan on legato notes, the etymology of the word, bowing, and music’s being about “more than just the notes” is especially awkward. Schreiber’s clumsy rendering of a nonspecific working-class accent doesn’t seem to fit him well either.
But this is really the worst thing that can be said about Every Day: it is, as I mentioned earlier, a “little film” that tries its darndest and just barely bites off a bit more than it can chew. Well-acted through and through, with the younger performers handing in some especially decent work. Eddie Izzard makes the wise choice of playing down the inevitable absurd “schlockmeisterness” of what is essentially a stock character — he actually manages to make him likable and only slips back into his accent once — while Helen Hunt gives an adequately excellent performance, infusing warmth and charm into the film’s most annoyed and put-upon character.
