In Theaters: Safety Not Guaranteed ***

As I sit down to write this review, I'm stumped.  Perhaps its the shoulder surgery I had a few days after seeing this movie that has, at once, blocked my memory of it and rendered me too mushy in the head to write a cognizable review.  But, alas, today is the first day since my surgery I've been able to sit and comfortably type at a computer, so damned if I'm going to waste it.



Mark Duplass, the unsung star of Safety Not Guaranteed, is mounting what appears to be a successful campaign for the Indie Movie Star of the Year Award.*  As I've mentioned before on this blog, he was the co-director of what is still one of my favorite movies of 2012, Jeff Who Lives at Home and was the male lead in another highly regarded independent dramedy, Your Sister's Sister.  In this movie, he takes his goofy everyman schtick to a weirder, quirkier level and it goes off without a hitch.

Duplass plays Kenneth, a loner grocery store employee who may also be a brilliant scientist.  He places a classified ad seeking a partner on a journey back in time.  The ad gets the attention of some journalists in Seattle who decide to take a trip to Kenneth's small home town in order to write a story about Kenneth and his ad.

The journalists are played supporting actors from two of my favorite current TV shows.  Jake Johnson (from New Girl) plays the veteran journalist who actually wants to go on the trip in order to find an old girlfriend from high school.  Aubrey Plaza (from Parks and Recreation), who plays one of his interns, who's going on the trip because she's apparently too bored to do anything else.  If you're familiar with Plaza's work on Parks, you know that's not much of a stretch for her.  They are joined by Arnau (played by relative newcomer Karan Soni), a video game obsessed nerd who is too terrified to talk to women.

Darius (Plaza's character) approaches Kenneth at the grocery store to inquire about his ad.  He trusts her almost immediately, apparently sensing that she's as awkward, sad, and regretful as he is.  The best moments in the movie are the ones that focus on these two characters as they peel off their protective layers and develop a relationship that feels genuine, even if it is based on a lie.  And, while the movie consistently moves toward a predictable moment when Kenneth learns about Darius's true motives, it never feels like its recycling the generic I-was-lying-at-first-but-now-I-really-love-you storyline.

Ultimately, every character in this movie is yearning for a time when things made more sense, before some change made them sad or cynical.  Kenneth believes he can literally create a machine to eliminate his regrets and make right his mistakes.  Jeff (Johnson's character) tries to figuratively go back in time by meeting up with his old girlfriend and dragging their past relationship into the future.  Arnau has yet to experience anything that he'll regret losing later.  Eventually, after learning about the impossibility of even figurative time travel for himself, Jeff compensates by trying to drag Arnau into a future of his own.

Darius is the only one not trying resurrect anything from her past.  Her life is marked by a tragedy for which she blames herself, but she's under no illusions that she can fix it, whether by time machine or other means.  She simply wants to move on, which is what her character arc is mostly about.

None of these issues about loss and regret are addressed with simple, pop psychology answers or tired movie cliches about forgetting the past in order to have a future.  Most of the major emotional questions are left hanging open, which works very well.

What doesn't work so well is the climax to the story that seems to try to answer too many of the actual plot questions and wrap up the overall story in a package that's just too neat than the one the rest of the movie deserves.  In my head, there was a perfect way for this movie to end, and I thought for sure that that was where it was going.  The actual ending was a little too on the nose for my taste.

Still, Safety Not Guaranteed is a good movie that will leave you with a smile on your face, particularly if you, like me, have a built-in affection for the actors in the movie.

*To the best of my knowledge, no such award actually exists.