How to Be Single - Movie Review
1"How to Be Single" (2016) directed by Christian Ditter is quite stereotypical and cliché but is still a fairly fun watch if you're into these kind of films like I am. It definitely helps that the four lead actors are some of my favorites of all time.
Four women named Alice (Dakota Johnson), Robin (Rebel Wilson), Meg (Leslie Mann) & Lucy (Alison Brie) have different ways of approaching their dating lives. Alice is afraid of being alone and risks not living life to the fullest, Robin is highly promiscuous, Meg worries that her career is taking away from other parts of her life, and Lucy overly relies on dating app formulas to find a perfect match. Alice teaches David (Damon Wayans Jr.) the importance of communication, Lucy shows Tom (Anders Holm) that being able to form proper human connections is important, Ken (Jake Lacy) proves to Meg that she doesn't have to be fiercely independent all the time, and Robin learns to treat her friends better. How to Be Single is ultimately about learning to be content with being by yourself and enjoying your own life without the necessity of a partner.
Okay so I admit I struggled trying to summarize the plot in my own words up above, but that's because this is definitely more of a character driven slice of life window into various people's lives than it is one coherent straight forward story. Each character was given time to breathe and I respected that almost nobody was thrown under the bus at any point, which would have been an easy and predictable thing to do in a movie like this. I also appreciated that our characters were multi faceted and had actual depth to them. It makes it much easier to forgive tropes and stereotypes when it's being handled relatively well like it is here.
What I don't like about How to Be Single is how misguided and wrong it can feel sometimes. Characters will give themselves permission to cheat on each other because they perceive it as acceptable even though we never hear anyone explicitly lay out terms or use common sense / basic human decency. Rebel Wilson is a very funny individual but she was the weak link here because she is seemingly always type casted as a promiscuous sex-positive person, which is perpetuating a bad stereotype and message in my opinion because it's always large women who are chosen for these roles and they should be worth more than this and I also have a hard time believing that sleeping with so many partners per night can lead to true self confidence and happiness as it always does for these kind of roles. Lucy was also a bit of a weak link, getting less screen time and development compared to her counterparts, and might have been the only one to not complete an arc as well, as she just randomly lucks out by being unhinged and meeting someone completely new and unrelated to the rest of the movie's events and characters.
How to Be Single is my kind of guilty pleasure but I won't pretend it's incredibly or anything. In my opinion it perpetuates bad stereotypes that I would like to see dropped in the near future, but is otherwise executed well enough that I can look past them and still have a good time.
Video by Rainy Nights.
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