All I Wish is a 2018 dramatic comedy about an aspiring fashion designer who struggles to find success and love.
There’s a hook at the center of Susan Walter‘s All I Wish that is, admittedly, at the start, sort of clever, tracking the years of ups and downs of the story on a number of successive birthdays. But even as the potential for this leads to plenty of open doors, the real heart of this is its star, Sharon Stone, who has made a career of smoldering controversial roles yet somehow in a comedy, tackling the aging topic, finds the story’s best footing. It’s a flawed movie, unrepentantly light, avoiding any real philosophy on the year by year antics of a woman that doesn’t seem to grow, but Stone remains endlessly watchable.
Turning forty-six at the start, Senna (Sharon Stone) is in the habit of dating and sleeping with men twenty years younger. To say she’s against marriage and commitment is an understatement. She’s sort of a fashion designer but works for a clothing company as a buyer, though loses that job fast. Her mother Celia (Ellen Burstyn) is a kindly woman but not entirely on board with her daughter’s life choices while her best friend Darla (Liz Lapira) tires to steer her into the light. Eventually, she meets Adam (Tony Goldwyn), a high roller who isn’t into the whole scene that Senna seems to be about even as he becomes slightly obsessed in holding a relationship with her.
Walter’s isn’t working with subtlety here, the film a rollercoaster of contrivances and manipulations both with dialogue and music that swings us to both sides of the pendulum as we go from birthday to birthday. It’s an almost in your face effort with jazzy ‘happy birthday to you’ music playing throughout and little montages of romantic comedy standards shot at us like artillery fire, yet there’s no stopping Stone who commits like she’s trying to make a first impression. As such, it definitely has a kind of movie of the week feel about it, the low budget attitude and pro woman power ballad tone keeping this energized.
Still, the film unspools locked to its formula, as each year aligns itself with landmarks, such as a sit down with Celia, her gifts scathing commentary on her daughter’s spiral. Senna continues her antics with young one night stands while Adam weaves in and out of her life, slowing getting embedded in it all. Obviously, Senna is a wishy-washy woman who teeters on a line that tasks women with being independent but feeling tethered to traditional wifey roles. This puts Senna in moments where she promotes carefree sex but laments the fact that Adam wants to live with her without a wedding. It’s a weird sort of seesaw effect that leaves the movie constantly off balance.
All I Wish is a dash of physical comedy with a few dramatic spices, where characters randomly sit in front of a black velvet background and talk candidly to the camera about birthday nightmares and wishes as cutaways between the years. It swings from relentlessly kitchy to maddeningly sappy, seemingly unsure what it wants to be, yet through it all is Stone who seems determined to entertain. She at least makes it a little more fun than it actually is.