What Happens Later, review: Meg Ryan’s airport romcom is even worse than Spielberg’s The Terminal
“For Nora,” reads the end title card of What Happens Later – a dedication to the undisputed romcom queen Nora Ephron, whose films enthroned Meg Ryan as a beloved star. If this script had an ounce of Ephron’s wit or warmth, we’d be getting somewhere. Few but the creator of When Harry Met Sally… could have taken the concept of two old flames stuck at an airport and made something buoyant and insightful out of it.
Ryan directs herself, opposite a rigidly inexpressive David Duchovny, and seems to have gone out of her way to withhold cinematic pleasure. The film is so sterile, with its mulish determination to make a steel-and-glass purgatory out of boarding gates in Anywheresville, USA, that you half-suspect its main characters might be dead.
Perversely, this could have livened things up. In this chilly environment, barely populated by other passing souls, you pine for the Ephron touch. Even the soft furnishings of Nancy Meyers (The Holiday) would be a consolation.
Playwright Steven Dietz, with co-writing assistance from Ryan and Kirk Lynn, has here adapted his own 2009 two-hander, Shooting Star. It’s about Willa (Ryan) and Bill (Duchovny), who broke up 25 years ago, and are brought together when grounded by a fateful snowstorm. Their respective flights are to Boston and Austin, since everything must rhyme in this film they’re lost in. Per the poster, we’re meant to nod at the cosmic aptness of a thuddingly obvious metaphor: “They missed their connection.”
Ryan’s film has no specific cause to be pleased with itself, but exudes that impression from beginning to end. Extras scuttle about silently, heads down. No strangers must interrupt the leads’ back-and-forth – which rakes over everything that went wrong between them aeons ago, from trust issues to parenting dilemmas. The one thing jolting them from this coma-inducing ancient history is the occasional, direct address of a God-like tannoy announcer – a device that might well have produced some scattered chortles at half-filled fringe theatres, that’s for sure.
If you can believe it, this is worse than The Terminal (Spielberg’s nadir, by a country mile). It’s harder still not to be reminded of Sartre’s No Exit, set in Hell. Even when the duo commandeer a luggage cart and trundle around these shiny corridors getting sozzled, we remain prisoners in their departure lounge of the damned.
Heavens, it drags. There’s plenty of time to notice Ryan’s double-take resemblance to Nicole Kidman in profile, and Duchovny’s decent impersonation of a male humanoid. As far as laughs go, the indescribably naff CG shot of two entwined snowflakes that begins the film is as good as it gets. What Happens Later is an ill-advised title, to boot. It terrorises you with bleak thoughts of this never ending.
What Happens Later is in cinemas Friday
