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Lola Versus: Trying for Hipster Godot

By Matt Meier · June 13, 2012

At the main culmination of Lola Versus, Lola (Greta Gerwig) explains to her friend Alice (Zoe Lister-Jones) an epiphany that recently came to her in the form of that old saying about the need to love yourself in order to love others: “I don’t think that’s true,” she says. “I think to love yourself, you have to love everyone else.” Lola innocently smiles and shrugs with the satisfaction of a 6-year-old handing mommy and daddy her masterpiece finger painting, and the close-up lingers as though awaiting our ovation before cutting away.

 Sorry, Lola, but you don’t get a gold star for discovering altruism just before you turn 30.

The second film from writer/director Daryl Wein and co-writer/supporting actress Zoe Lister-Jones, Lola Versus takes a far more populace approach to the indie romance/character-study genre they captured with such spirited authenticity in their semi-autobiographical feature debut, Breaking Upwards. Lola Versus may command slightly more street cred than What to Expect When You’re Expecting or other comparable popcorn competitors due to its unmistakably indie aesthetics—a score by Fall On Your Sword and a soundtrack of artists you’ll never hear on a station that isn’t NPR, an inexplicably white NYC backdrop with a self-aware token black character, non-glossy cinematography with an affinity for muted colors and handheld shots, and Greta Gerwig—but the film’s ostensible strivings toward intellectual superiority are only skin deep. Despite some fleetingly witty dialogue and a particularly amusing scene featuring a well-endowed fish enthusiast, Lola Versus ultimately proves as platitudinous as any Katherine Heigl summer RomCom.

After Lola’s fiancé Luke (Joel Kinnaman) calls things off only weeks before their wedding, Lola desperately seeks reassurance from her friends, family and pretty much anyone else willing to indulger her “I’m about to turn 30 and my fiancé just dumped me” early-life crisis.  I by no means wish to minimize the obvious hardship of being dumped three weeks before scheduled to become married—even the most resilient of us would slip into acute emotional crisis mode in the wake of such abrupt adversity—but the subsequent hardships that Lola faces throughout the film, the obstacles from which the title Lola Versus derives, have far less to do with the inciting incident of the break-up than with Lola’s own heedlessness and the repercussions it yields.

 Lola quickly turns to Henry (Hamish Linklater), a mutual friend of her and Luke, as a romantic rebound, one that she initiates though he concedes to having wanted for quite some time. The obvious initial assumption would be that we’ve entered the classic love triangle scenario as she decides between her ex-fiancé, who (of course) immediately regrets calling off the wedding, and her ex-fiancé’s best friend. But that storyline dies out soon enough when she randomly and somewhat inexplicably decides to sleep with Nick (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the eccentric fish enthusiast who hit on her near the beginning of the film.

“I’m slutty but I’m a good person,” Lola pleads to Henry after he catches Nick walking her home. It would be funny if not for the sincerity of her conviction and the egocentrism that blinds her to the fallacy of such a statement.

It’s not as though Lola is the first egocentric protagonist we’ve ever encountered in a film (indie or otherwise). Ben Stiller’s titular character in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg (2010), in which Gerwig co-starred as Stiller’s love interest, is a far more disagreeable character with an Asperger’s-like rage and a fair amount of social rigidity. However, what compels us to Greenberg is not his sympathetic qualities, but rather his acute lack thereof. But where Baumbach wholly embraces Greenberg’s ardent disregard for others as the foundation of his character, Lola Versus refuses to vilify its protagonist, demanding that we give our sympathy for Lola as she works through her arc of taking responsibility for her own actions.

It goes without saying that character arc (i.e. the protagonist’s evolution with respect to his/her wants & needs) often plays a central role in storytelling. But Lola Versus exemplifies the danger in relying on arc as the only determinant of plot progression. Take a film like 10 Things I Hate About You as a contrasting example. Although the film is largely centered upon Kat (Julia Stiles) shedding her hostility toward others and allowing herself to be emotionally vulnerable, there are various other external factors that advance the plot and motivate her evolution. Conversely, in Lola Versus, essentially every plot point following Luke ending their engagement derives from Lola’s own doing, making the culmination of her “arc” all the less fulfilling.

As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20, and we’ve all had to face the repercussions of our missteps at one point or another, but to rely only on a shallow interiority as the foundation of an entire narrative does not make a film more authentic or relatable, and certainly does nothing to entertain or engage the viewer. Instead, Lola Versus succeeds only in stating the obvious, and that’s hardly better than saying nothing at all.