We've seen so many comedies about co-dependent female BFFs (Do guys call one another BFFs? Never.) dealing with the realities of adulthood that they've become a genre unto themselves. The festival circuit loves them, and they have found a niche in the indie market where they are practically unavoidable. Many of them follow the same peaks and valleys, the same romantic entanglements, the same life responsibilities intruding on an unbreakable bond. So when a film like Life Partners comes along that tries to go in a somewhat different direction than the norm, a direction grounded in emotional truth, it's worth giving notice to.
Seeing the benefit of two terrific leads in Leighton Meester and Gillian Jacobs, the film always feels like we're being let in on the private conversations of two people living in their own little world. Maybe that's because director and co-writer Susanna Fogel wrote the script with her best buddy, Jodi Lefkowitz, basing it on their experiences together. So the inside jokes and relationship quirks have a personal, lived-in quality that is consistently engaging, even when the demands of plot steer into familiar territory.
Paige (Jacobs) is the grown up of the duo, or seemingly so. She's the one with the career and a life trajectory headed upwards, while unmotivated Sasha (Meester) has dreams of being a musician but finds herself stuck in a dead-end receptionist job. The two are basically kindred spirits; they've been together so long that they finish one another's sentences, laugh at the same stupid jokes, watch the same bad reality TV, and share the same friends. Of course, being so tied to one person tends to be a hurdle for building healthy relationships with others, and when the two women begin pursuing romantic relationships with others, the results are understandably hit-or-miss.
What thankfully doesn't become an issue, at least not an overtly stated one, is that of Sasha's sexuality. She's a lesbian with a veritable army of histrionic gay friends and past sexual conquests, but at no point does Fogel take us down the "does she secretly love Paige" route that simpler comedies would have. Instead, we see their friendship tested by common concerns faced by all close-knit friends at some point. Paige hooks up with Tim (Adam Brody) and despite his being pretty milquetoast, she begins to fall for him. As she falls deeper into her relationship with Tim, Sasha is left on her own to deal with bad dates, cranky exes, and to wallow in her personal misery. The wedge grows between them as Paige contemplates marriage and a completely new life with Tim, while Sasha is stuck acting like she's 20 rather than nearing 30.
Familiar, right? Sure it is, and while Fogel may paint the supporting characters in broad strokes she doesn't with Paige and Sasha. Neither woman is perfectly happy, and they have their share of hang-ups. Paige may be the more responsible of the two on the surface, but she's also got a petty streak which we see play out in a legal dispute with a neighbor. Sasha is like a lot of people lost in trying to discover who they were truly meant to be, and fearful that it may never happen. The best scenes in the film are when the Paige and Sasha are together cracking jokes to deflect from their problems. If Meester and Jacobs aren't friends in reality you could have fooled me; they get along like pals straight from the womb. On the other hand, Adam Brody continues to be damage nearly every film he's in. Partly it's the characters he plays, who are always that Hollywood kind of "geeky cool" that doesn't actually exist. This has been an issue ever since The O.C. and Brody never grew out of it. Here, he plays a character whose defining traits are that he loves The Big Lebowski and wears t-shirts with messages on them.
With a great cast and witty script, Life Partners delivers with a personal touch a universal story of friendship and growing up.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
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