Lake Bell's Second Feature as a Director Underwhelms

Hey, couples, are you looking for some cute bullshit to go see on a date night? Well, Lake Bell is here for you with her second film as writer, director and star.

Actually, Bell is part of an ensemble of actors who populate I Do … Until I Don’t, which is set in a beach town in Florida (dubbed “the divorce capital of America”). Her character, a perky yet continually agitated blonde named Alice, is married to Noah (Ed Helms), a struggling window-blinds salesman who’s itching to have kids. The perpetually insecure Alice thinks her husband has a thing for her free-spirited sister Fanny (Amber Heard), who is in a blissful open relationship with her boho baby daddy Zander (Wyatt Cenac). Elsewhere in the town are Harvey (Paul Reiser) and Cybill (Mary Steenburgen), the resident seniors who’ve been married for so damn long that their conversations consist mostly of bitter jabs.

These couples will eventually become the unwitting guinea pigs for a new documentary helmed by an ambitious, morally ambiguous British filmmaker (Dolly Wells), who is ready to debunk the myth of holy matrimony by capturing these couples at their worst.

If you saw Bell’s promising and refreshingly sardonic 2013 directorial debut In a World … (what’s up with her and ellipses?), you might think she’d handle the subject of marriage with sharp claws and cynicism. But I Do is about as saccharine and screwball as any ensemble Hollywood rom-com. It’s almost like Bell is using this movie as an audition of sorts, letting the big studios know she can make an all-star clusterfuck of couplings as lovably and as toothlessly as the late Garry Marshall did.

As much as Bell shows off her eye for fluid, scenic shots, the movie is disappointing in how it serves up caricatures more than full-bodied characters — and that also includes damn-near-offensive supporting folk, like the emotionless lesbian assistant whom Wells’ filmmaker usually tortures, and the black, predictably ratchet massage-parlor owner whom Bell’s character briefly works for. Even though Bell gives her main players a moment in which they quit the wacky shit and actually resemble real, sincere people, the movie still is a hyper-ridiculous farce that mostly coasts on its adorableness. (Your patience might run out by the time the aggravatingly contrived and sentimental ending rolls around.)

Don’t be surprised if you start feeling like Wells’ character while watching I Do… Until I Don’t — you might wish Bell would just knock off the silliness and give you some good, juicy shit.

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