Ignoring the actor billing, The Longest Week centers around Jason Bateman as Conrad, who is essentially the antithesis of his famous character from Arrested Development – this time, he’s the one living off of his family wealth. He’s a 40-year-old who hasn’t worked a day in his life and struggles to find any meaning within it, given his skewed life perspective and general loneliness. His only friend is a similarly well off character, Dylan (Billy Crudup), and their relationship is filled with envious banter. Everything changes when they both fall for the same woman, Beatrice (Olivia Wilde), and over the course of one week (hence the title) we see as the love triangle rapidly shifts in various directions.
It’s clear that there is a great deal of films that this movie aspires to be within the wheelhouse of affluent protagonists reaching human epiphanies. The Royal Tenenbaums immediately comes to mind, especially given the emphasis on the narrator: both feature a non-character voice over to give them a more literary feeling. Even many elements of Woody Allen films such as Manhattan and Annie Hall come out in this movie. But unlike all of the films that it emulates, The Longest Week feels as shallow as its protagonist, who similarly strives for greatness in his writing, but lacks the drive or humanity to accomplish greatness. Rather than developing the characters organically, the film relies heavily on expository narration, which gives the scenes themselves significantly less impact.
Rather than developing the characters organically, the film relies heavily on expository narration, which gives the scenes significantly less impact.
That being said, there is nothing that is indigestible about this film. All of the performances are solid but almost certainly side projects for these big names, and at a brisk 85 minutes, nothing protrudes as severely bad. In fact, there are glimmers of hope that give the movie some authenticity. As the relationship between Conrad and Beatrice develops, some universal emotions of early love are displayed well. Yet most are sadly weighed down by the rest of the movie.
If anything, the movie feels extremely self-aware: toward the end of the film, Conrad publishes a book, and the criticisms of his writing are nearly identical to the easy criticisms of the film. What this means is not exactly clear, but it indicates that there’s a level of self-awareness with this project. There isn’t too much else to say with this film: it is by no means poorly constructed or bad quality, but it falls far beneath any benchmark of comparable films, both in the story and for these well-known actors.
