Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

I Give It a Year Blu-ray Movie Review

I Give It a Belly Laugh

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 21, 2013

A romantic comedy from a writer and producer of Borat, Brüno and Da Ali G Show? Sounds about as likely as a sensitive coming-of-age tale from the makers of Saw. But here it is, writer Dan Mazer's directorial debut about what happens after the curtain comes down on happily ever after and the blissful couple prepares to leave the altar. As they exchange their vows, the bride's bitchy sister mutters, "I give it a year!"

Mazer has given the stale rom-com a kick in the rear by focusing on a couple that clearly, from the very outset, does not belong together. They're both good people, but they're mismatched. Where the usual formula has the audience yearning for the lovers to overcome all obstacles so that they can eventually fall into each other's arms, Mazer has arranged matters so that you spend most of his film praying that they'll take their marriage counselor's advice and just split up already.

Drawing on the credibility of his work with Sacha Baron Cohen, Mazer attracted the backing of Working Title Films, which has been a comedy powerhouse for almost two decades, producing everything from Four Weddings and a Funeral to The Big Lebowski to Hot Fuzz and The World's End. The hilarity of the script attracted a sterling cast, including Stephen Merchant, the towering (literally) co-creator of The Office and Extras, whose voice Mazer had specifically imagined when he created the character of the groom's tactless best man, who gives a nightmare wedding toast and then periodically reappears to say something cringeworthy. Merchant enlivened production by doing his best to make everyone else crack up and ruin their takes, because, as he says in an interview in the extras, why not have fun while making a comedy?

The same anarchic spirit is evident throughout I Give It a Year, which is edgier and more explicit than most British comedies—a result many of the film's participants attribute to the influence of Judd Apatow, though I doubt even Apatow would have imagined the humiliating threesome that Mazer gleefully stages.

Nat (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Rafe Spall) meet at a party, have instant chemistry and are married seven months later with a lavish outdoor reception under a gorgeous sky. The only sour notes are the reverend's coughing and the awful speech by best man Danny (Merchant). The bride's evil-tongued sister, Naomi (Minnie Driver), manages to restrain herself for one day, though her customary mode is a constant stream of venom directed against everyone, including her own downtrodden husband, a doctor named Hugh (Jason Flemying). (But if anyone challenged the institution of marriage, Naomi would defend it to the death.) After a thrilling honeymoon of lust and sightseeing—the photos are the basis of one of the film's squirmiest gags—Nat and Josh return to London to start their life together.

And bump comes reality. Nine months later, the couple is sitting across a desk from a marriage counselor (Oliva Colman) who is either the worst imaginable or possibly the most qualified, given the state of her own marriage, of which Nat and Josh get a glimpse when she briefly leaves the room to have a screaming cell phone argument with her husband. Flashbacks explain how they arrived there.

In an all-too-familiar tale, the initial intensity of sexual chemistry concealed the very real differences that emerged once Nat and Josh had to build a life together. A writer with one published novel, Josh is struggling with his sophomore effort, including the usual woes of self-doubt and writer's block. He leads a shaggy, improvised life, with a delight in the absurd and a high tolerance for chaos. Nat, by contrast, holds an advertising job in an office and regulates her life by schedules and routine. She needs her day and her surroundings to be tidy and organized, and absurdity amuses her only in small doses, if at all. Before long, the quirks that each spouse once found endearing in the other have transformed into daily irritations that build up to recurrent arguments. And the sexual chemistry? Inert.

While Mazer pursues this through line, which, by itself, might be depressing, he buoys the film with a stream of jokes from the supporting cast, but he does something even more clever by smuggling in a rom-com cliche by the side door. Both Nat and Josh meet the people they should have married—we can see it, even if they can't—and Mazer is smart enough not to make either of them perfect. In Nat's case, he's a new advertising client, Guy Harrap, heir to a fortune in the solvent business. (Yes, the solvent business, which is a joke in itself.) He's handsome, because he's played by Simon Baker; he's genuine and has a sense of humor; and he's interested, because Nat conceals that she's married (a colleague persuades her that flirting with him will help land the account). But he's no suave smoothie when it comes to romance, and Guy's ill-conceived efforts to woo Nat progress from parody to chaos, in a scene that not even the Marx Brothers could have designed. No words of mine could possibly do it justice. Let's just say that live animals are involved.

Josh's soul mate appears in the form of his former girlfriend, Chloe, an American who left him years ago to do good deeds in the Third World and has suddenly reappeared in London working with an AIDS relief organization. She's played by Anna Faris, whom I literally did not recognize until I saw her name in the credits, because Faris is usually cast in clownish, two-dimensional roles dominated by physical comedy. Here, though, she creates a credible and complex human presence. Her Chloe is someone who is even more adventurous and less needful of structure than Josh, but Faris conveys, with the simplest of means, Chloe's dawning sense that she's reached the point in her life where she needs someone to take care of her just a little bit. Having missed her chance with Josh, she's unsure where to turn.

So desperate do Nat and Josh become to "fix" their situations that they arrange an evening out for the four of them (in a scene obviously borrowed from When Harry Met Sally . . .) where they try to pair up Guy and Chloe. The results are not only unsuccessful, but they also sharpen the marital conflict. Having listened to this saga (and, one suspects, not for the first time), the counselor throws up her hands and gives them a practical goal: try to make it to their one-year anniversary and see what happens next. With this blueprint before him, Mazer cheerfully ticks off a list of further rom-com cliches (the last-minute proposal; the hot pursuit to the train station, airport or bus depot; the sudden change of heart; the "I can't believe you were there all the time" realization), but he spins them until they're dizzy, then knocks them to the floor. He even gives everyone a happy ending, except perhaps Stephen Merchant's Danny, who probably wouldn't recognize a happy ending except in a massage parlor.

I Give It a Year Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I Give It a Year was shot on the Arri Alexa by Ben Davis, whose impressive credits include Layer Cake, Kick-Ass and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Whether through on-set lighting or digital post-production, Davis has married (if you'll forgive the term) the Alexa's noted ability to capture a film-like image with the advantages of digital acquisition to recreate the delicate textures and hues of a traditional romantic film within a realistic contemporary setting, all of which makes the eruption of comic mayhem that much funnier.

Magnolia Home Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced from digital files, because the image has retained all the sharpness, clarity and detail that one expects from a digitally originated production. The blacks in key night scenes are suitably dark, and the colors in the many and varied locales, including clubs, restaurants and the floor of Simon's factory, are distinctive and appropriately saturated. The detail is so good that one can make out lots of prurient detail in Nat's and Josh's honeymoon photos when they show up at an inopportune moment. ("That's doggy style", Josh adds helpfully, not that the viewer needs any explanation.)

Magnolia is consistently reliable in not aiming for the tightest possible compression, even with digitally originated material that would probably compress with less risk of artifacts. The average bitrate of 29.28 Mbps is generous for this non-action movie. Other studios could take a lesson (not that I would Image-ine myself Warner-ing anyone in particular).

I Give It a Year Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's original 5.1 soundtrack is presented in lossless DTS-HD MA. Like many comedies, I Give It a Year has a front-oriented mix with the emphasis on dialogue, although there are various scenes where the environmental ambiance helps establish the mood (e.g., the wedding, an official function where Josh accompanies Nat, Nat's tour of Guy's factory and various restaurant scenes). Every so often director Mazer will add an extra wallop to a specific sound for comic effect; an example occurs during Guy's first meeting with Nat when he pounds on the table, and Guy's ill-fated effort to impress Nat with a romantic display has many such sounds, most of them indescribable.

The alternately sweet and frenetic score is by the versatile Ilan Eshkeri, also a veteran of Layer Cake and Kick-Ass, as well as Ralph Fiennes' exceptional filmed adaptation of Coriolanus.

I Give It a Year Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Blooper Reel (1080p; 1.78:1; 7:17): Keeping a straight face during comedy is hard.



• Outtakes: The Doves (1080p; 1.78:1; 3:07): Working with live animals and a terrified actress can produce interesting results. As director Mazer says, she knew it was in the script, but somehow failed to mention she was mortally afraid of birds.



• Deleted/Extended Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1; 15:22): There are seven scenes, but they are not separately listed. All of them are funny, but by far the most outrageous is Nat's and Josh's wedding night.



• Making of I Give It a Year: Relationships & Marriages (1080p; 1.78:1; 3:03): A short EPK focusing on the film's subject matter.



• Making of I Give It a Year: The Characters (1080p; 1.78:1; 3:29): An alternate EPK focusing on the individual characters.



• Cast and Crew Interviews (1080p; 1.78:1): Though divided into two groups, the interviews are wide-ranging, though sometimes a little choppy, because the questions from the off-screen interviewers have been edited out.
• Rose Byrne (Nat) (2:28)
• Anna Faris (Chloe) (2:45)
• Rafe Spall (Josh) (3:57)
• Simon Baker (Guy) (3:27)
• Minnie Driver (Naomi) (2:32)
• Jason Flemying (Hugh) (2:00)
• Stephen Merchant (Danny) (3:26)
• Dan Mazer (writer & director) (3:10)
• Kris Thykier (producer) (4:06)



• International Interviews (1080p; 1.78:1)
• Rose Byrne (Nat) (6:19)
• Rafe Spall (Josh) (6:55)
• Simon Baker (Guy) (11:07)
• Dan Mazer (writer & director) (6:18)



• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment: The various trailers for I Give It a Year (red band and green band) are not included, but the disc does offer trailers for Drinking Buddies, Prince Avalanche, Syrup and Touchy Feely, as well as a promo for AXS TV. These also play at startup, where they can be skipped with the chapter forward button.



• BD-Live: As of this writing, attempting to access BD-Live gave the message "Check back later for updates".

I Give It a Year Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

In their interviews, some of the cast and the film's producer—but not Mazer himself—make fairly extravagant claims for the likely influence of I Give It a Year on future rom-coms and British comedy in general. It's hubris to predict such things, but Mazer has made the funniest film I've seen about marriage in years, because it's steeped in a genuine understanding of the subject. (He insists that his own is happy.) No new film has made me laugh this hard or this often since Knocked Up, perhaps because Mazer writes equally well for both male and female characters, and they both get as many laughs. Magnolia has assembled a first-rate Blu-ray with a good selection of extras. Highly recommended.