Seeking a Friend at the End of the World

My admiration for Steve Carell went up a couple notches after I saw him in Seeking a Friend at the End of the World. I’d always liked him for his off-the-wall humor, never overplayed or reliant on toilet gags. I loved him in Crazy, Stupid Love, and here he is again, only this time more dramatically serious than comedic. In fact, I can’t figure out why this movie was labeled a comedy. That may be the only criticism I have, that the few places near the beginning where humor was intended didn’t need to be there, or at least not for the sake of comedy. The bit when Dodge is still at work selling insurance, quoting the cost of an Armageddon policy, could have been played straighter just to indicate how nonsensical it would be to keep going to work even though science has shown that the world will come to an end in three weeks, that Matilda the asteroid was really going to strike the earth and kill us all. The salacious comments at the house party weren’t really necessary except to show how hedonists might act with only a short time to live. The question I and everyone else who sees this movie would ask: What would I do if I knew I had only twenty-one days left? Would I go to work every day like some of his fellow insurance salesmen or Dodge’s housekeeper Elsa? Would I leap from a tall building like some of the Wall Streeters on Black Thursday in 1929. Would I hire a hitman to take me out? Would I join the rabble who loot and burn just for the thrill of looting and burning? Would I stay at the party at “Friendsies,” drinking, drugging, kissing everyone is sight, screwing everyone in sight? Would I be one of those being baptized at the beach? Would I be like Speck, who built himself a well-provisioned bomb shelter for the day after? Or would I, like Dodge, try to find the love of my life, try to find God, try to find some meaning in a life about to end? After he pulls the weeping Penny (Keira Knightley) into his apartment from the fire escape, they both set out to do the one thing they most want to do, Dodge to find his one true love, his high school sweetheart; Penny to get back to England to see her family for the last time. Along the way they encounter people doing their thing, a trucker (Bill Peterson) who has hired a hit on himself (But why would the hitter need a fee?), Speck with his titanium-walled hideaway, Dodge’s estranged father (Martin Sheen). They also, despite their age difference, find their own true loves—each other. I loved the quiet romance between them. Keira Knightly, whom I fell in love with in Pride and Prejudice for her beauty and sexily pursed mouth, wasn’t that same beauty, here rather squinty-eyed and with unattractive hair style. But Steve fell in love with her as did I all over again.