Plus One is a 2019 comedy/drama about two friends who agree to be each other’s plus one at every wedding they’ve been invited to.
Everyone gets married but me. That’s the big tent premise of dozens of romcoms scattered about the cinematic landscape that feature the forlorn with a best friend who is always the most obvious choice in getting themselves to the altar even though they’re totally blind until the end. You know the drill. And so here we are again with writer and directors Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer‘s newest effort Plus One, a perfectly pleasant stick-to-the-what-works romance that finds a few unexplored bits and pieces along the way and a couple of earnest performances in making it mostly work.
Ben (Jack Quaid) is in a dilemma. He’s the best man at his pal’s wedding, which is bad enough, but he’s got six more weddings to attend before the year is out. Bummer. There’s also Alice (Maya Erskine), his college friend, just out of a bad breakup, who has herself four weddings on the docket. To make things easier, they naturally decided to help each other through the nightmare by being each other’s plus ones. Along the way, well, they come to learn much more than they bargained for, finding temporary distractions in other lovers before their criss-crossy paths eventually collide.
Plus One is a movie that explains what a ‘meet cute’ is and then goes about doing it, not just embracing the structural supports of a modern romantic comedy but chaining itself to it like it were a fanatic activist. Is that bad? Well, if you’ve never been to a movie before, not at all. If you have, well, it’s so objectively inoffensive, it feels like that light windbreaker you forgot you had in the closet and discovered again. It does what it’s designed for.
What that means is Plus One knows what it wants to be so clearly, it’s nearly scientific in its methodology and mechanics, hitting all the emotional buttons with surgical precision. You’ll surely laugh, maybe even out loud. You might even cry, the tugs it sets up as predictable as the morning sun but crafted and let loose with a cast that understands exactly what they’re here for. It gleefully tosses in hallmarks from When Harry Met Sally to Four Weddings and Funeral and just about every other hit in the genre that broke new ground, and if you’re fans of any of these movies, you will find this one fulfilling.
A movie like this is teflon coated, critic proof, with audiences watching in need of a fix that only this genre can offer. It absolutely is well made and propped up by a host of great supporting characters, including the great Ed Begley Jr. and a scene-stealing Rosalind Chao. Both Quaid (son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan) and Erskine have oodles of chemistry, with she especially earning high marks for commitment though it’s just too bad the story can’t find more space to find innovation. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Heck, it really doesn’t. Plus One is what it is and that’s all it needs to be.