An asteroid is approaching Earth and will destroy all life in three weeks. Among the people who accepted their fate is Dodge, whose wife left him. He encounters his neighbor, Penny, who also broke up with her boyfriend. After a riot around their neighborhood, Dodge and Penny embark on a journey in a car to Delaware, where Dodge's former crush, Olive, lives. She wrote a letter that Dodge was the love of her life, but he just recently found the notice. Finally at Olive's home, Dodge just leaves her a letter and returns to Penny, since he fell in love with the latter. Dodge's dad, a pilot, is supposed to fly Olive to England to her family, but she returns to Dodge. They lie in bed, confessing love, as the asteroid hits in the background.
An unusual apocalypse (tragi)comedy that works as some sort of humorous eddition of von Trier's "Melancholia", "Seeking a Friend..." is a good, albeit only moderately successful blend of funny-optimistic and depressive-bleak elements, since this mishmash of disparate moods is not able to unify the movie into a whole. The most was achieved out of its two great actors, Keira Knightley in an unusual turn as a comedian, and the always wonderful Steve Carell, an experienced comedian on the field. In one of the best jokes, their characters, Penny and Dodge, have to bury the assassinated truck driver Glenn, who picked them up. Just as Dodge places the last piece of soil on the grave, he asks her: "I'll drive. Do you have the keys?", and Penny looks down, at the burial site of Glenn. Dodge gets it, then picks up the shovel and starts digging up the soil all over again. In another inspired moment, Penny realizes she forgot to forward an important letter to Dodge, so they have this exchange:"I did ruin your life." - "No you didn't. I had a really long head start." The movie's themes contemplate about fatalism, existentialism, and how people sometimes have to accept the inevitable fate, in this case an asteroid crash, so Penny and Dodge are two people trying to experience one last adventure before death. The whole movie is basically about dying, especially in the second half, yet it is a pity it is limited at conjuring up some more profound, poetic moments with a higher ingenuity and philosophy, since many dramatic moments feel flat. Luckily, the movie avoids turning melancholic or melodramatic, and is restrained for most of the time, delivering a different kind of movie than expected.
Grade:++
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