Not to say that Serendipity is crap on the order of Con Air, but it falls easily into the vast remainder bin of romantic comedies that are reliably churned out by the dozen and that you can't remember ten minutes after leaving the theater. I had higher hopes for this one, since it was directed by Peter Chelsom -- yes, he was nominally responsible for the train wreck that was Town and Country, but he also wrote and directed two marvelous little gems, Hear My Song and Funny Bones, that are among my favorite movies. I guess from now on I should reserve my hopes for movies that Chelsom writes as well as directs, because Serendipity features very little of the quirky charm and originality of Hear My Song and Funny Bones.
Cusack's Jonathan and Kate Beckinsale's Sara meet one night and feel an instant connection, but both have significant others. Still, after they spend a few hours together, they are reluctant to disappear out of each other's lives. So Sara devises some ridiculous hoops through which Jonathan has to jump to see if they are "destined" to be together (personally, if some guy I met told me to see if we were destined for each other if we both chose the same floor in two different elevators or that he'd write his phone number in a book and sell it to a used bookstore and if we were meant to be together, I'd find it some day, I'd say, "Just fucking tell me you don't want to go out with me!"), but of course wacky interventions foil this cute little plan, they disappear from each other's lives, and some years later, both find themselves engaged but still wondering about the other. At least Jonathan's betrothed is beautiful and charming; poor Sara is saddled with an unkempt, solipsistic pseudo-Scandinavian Yanni. It's no real surprise in her case that she starts to get cold feet and wants to track down Jonathan; it's less understandable in his case. And then you get the standard romantic comedy near-misses (done far better and far more believably in Next Stop Wonderland), the comic-relief sidekicks (Molly Shannon for her, Jeremy Piven for him), and the broad comedic interval (supplied by Eugene Levy, who's hilarious).
I've got to say, I'm an idiot when it comes to this sort of wishful thinking, but even I didn't buy this story line. I mean, I believe in destiny to some extent, but not to the point of leaving my future happiness up to fate when the means of securing it myself are at hand. It's one thing to say that about some cute guy I see in passing on the Metro; it's another to say it about the guy with whom I spent a night, whose contact information I had ample time and opportunity to get. Whether or not you're "meant to be together" should be determined by the feeling you get from each other, not by how often you keep bumping into each other. I keep bumping into a guy on the Metro who calls me "FBI Lady," but I don't take it as a sign that we're meant for each other. (Good lord, I hope he doesn't, either.)
I was highly irritated by the intrusive, insipid, sugary soundtrack and the annoying, amateurish production values: in one scene, Cusack and Beckinsale enter an ice rink together, and then she's in a close-up shot where it's snowing furiously, and then in his close-up shot, he's apparently in an ice rink in another county where it's barely snowing at all. Or how one minute it's sunny and beautiful with flower petals drifting around, and the next it's snowing (if it was supposed to be magical realism, it was neither). Or the hackneyed way in which Chelsom indicates that time has passed: shots of clocks whirling around, then sundials -- yes, we get it, time is passing, why not just do the thing where the calendar pages fly off -- then a title that reads "a few years later."
A propos of nothing, I learned the word "serendipity" through a series of books I read when I was little that started with a story about a pink dragon named Serendipity, so whenever I hear the word, I think of a pink dragon. I'm not sure how that affected my feelings about the movie.
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