Not Cute: Meet Cute

Like Gary (Pete Davidson), we already have some vague level of understanding about what we’re getting into when we first encounter Sheila (Kaley Cuoco) at the bar. She’s the proverbial “messy” girl that New York so loves to promote in any media that centers on the city as its backdrop. Maybe that’s why another of Cuoco’s New York-based characters, Cassie Bowden on The Flight Attendant, so resembles this Sheila one. Except that, at least in Cassie’s case, the writers are given an entire season to slowly unveil the reasons why she is the way she is and why her life is “shit” (as many a “hot white girl” likes to declare).

With Sheila, we’re just supposed to take her at face value when she repeatedly says things like, “I’m just such a fucking loser. I’m such a fucking sad sack,” “No matter what, my life is shit, okay?” and “Time travel? Why would I wanna do that? Why would I wanna go back to yesterday? Yesterday was shit too.” Except that, when she does go back to “yesterday,” she perchance stumbles upon Gary in the aforementioned bar setting. The man she claims “saved” her—being that she was planning to kill herself before her nail tech, June (Deborah S. Craig), offered her access to a tanning bed time machine that allows one to go back just twenty-four hours. This being presented in a way that filmmakers Alex Lehmann and Noga Pnueli would like to believe is coming across as charmingly “madcap,” but instead only serves as one of many sources of incongruity and annoyance about this narrative.

In any event, as all people are able to do on their “first date” with someone, Sheila can project the belief that maybe this time it will be different. This person can be the one to give her a raison d’être. Of course, placing that much responsibility on another human being who can barely deal with their own neuroses is a recipe for disappointment. Which Sheila eventually encounters despite her best efforts to keep the initial spark alive. To her, however, this date has grown stale. Even though, to Gary, it feels like the first time every time. Save for little hints dropped about how the repetition of the night is starting to seep into his consciousness via various unexpectedly-remembered details. At some points, we even think he’s going to say he’s known all along that she’s been restarting the night and that’s he’s only continued to do so because he loves her so much. But that’s not the scenario presented by screenwriter Pnueli, in her debut feature. And perhaps as a debut effort, the film struggles to bother with much in the way of playing by its own faintly-established rules, constantly changing them through convenient “oh by the ways” (a.k.a. the over-usage of the term “I gotta come clean with you”) that Sheila decides to inform Gary of when she feels “the time is right.” Or rather, when it serves the “progression” of the plot, already stumbling to stay afloat at a clipped one hour and twenty-nine minutes (with credits included).

But, of course, the time is always wrong in that she’s cornered them both into a loop for the purpose of constantly reliving the same night (a Groundhog Day trend in film that’s been on the upswing since the pandemic—see also: Palm Springs). Obsessed with wanting to relive and recreate it so that it can be more perfect every time, Sheila only becomes increasingly disenchanted with Gary as the nights wear on—more specifically, three hundred and sixty-five nights. And even we, as the viewer, grow disinterested with the same conversation topics repurposed in different ways, all covering the subjects of how they both have dead dads, they’re both fucked up, etc., etc. Garden-variety normals posing as “New York eccentrics” shit.

Sheila being so normal, in fact, that she’s running around in a dress that looks like a picnic basket interior as she wishes to make Gary her “lobster.” Which is why she confesses to him during one of the nights, “This is the first time I’ve been this happy in a very, very long time.” We never quite know what’s been getting her down for so long, apart from the standard-issue potential cause: a traumatizing childhood. Which, undeniably, Gary has had as well—but you don’t see him trying to control another human being with Elmyra-level obsessiveness. And, ultimately, that’s the trope Meet Cute (sardonically named as it is) seeks to emphasize: women get clingy (as Pete’s ex, Ariana, said, “I can be needy/Way too damn needy”), seek all the answers to their “sad little lives” in men. The very creatures they also despise at the same time that they expect the world from them. Yet Sheila becomes convinced that if she could just “tweak” some small aspects of Gary’s past, he would be an even better, more perfect boyfriend (even if a single-serving one, based on her refusal to “exit out of” the night they meet). Needless to say, she’s not one for the “if you love someone, set them free” platitude.

Unfortunately, Sheila doesn’t take into account that Gary’s raging insecurities are part of what makes him such a “nice guy” (this clearly being the reason why Davidson was attracted to the role). For when she goes back further into the past (since, suddenly, that’s a new part of the “rules” of the time machine—previously believed to only be capable of going back twenty-four hours) to change key moments she views as “where things went wrong for Gary,” it turns him into a bit of an arrogant dick. And as she confesses what she did to this “new” Gary, he’s absolutely horrified by her entire being, assuring her that no matter what she does to change him, “I’ll still never wanna be with you,” subsequently writing “Sheila sucks balls” on his hand with a Sharpie.

Among the ways Sheila wanted to boost Gary’s overall confidence in himself as a youth was by playing catch with him in the yard (being that his father wasn’t in the picture to do so), dissuading him from losing himself in books like the one he’s holding when she knocks on his door (looking like a bad drag king), The Right Hand of Lightness by Ursula LeGrin (a spoof of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness). She as “Uncle Charlie” also tells him that “people don’t like mimes” and so he ought to stop miming.

Watching all this unraveling of Gary’s core personality and essence is June, who keeps allowing Sheila to use her tanning bed time machine in the back room (ostensibly because she knows it’s the only thing that will keep Sheila from killing herself). But she finally has to speak out in some way against what her “client” is doing by telling her, “If you erase the pain, you erase the person.” Which she achieved with the “Old Gary” by “deleting a few people” from his formative years, like his middle school bully, Patrick, his math teacher, Mrs. Kaiser, and his ex just before he and Sheila met, Amber. Oh yeah, and she also “added” Tatiana, the hot pizza delivery girl who Gary loses his virginity to.

As the would-be couple get into a heated argument over the nefariousness of what Sheila has done, one of the two old ladies sitting on a bench nearby comments of the fight they’ve just witnessed, “Personally, I think he should feel touched that somebody cares so deeply to take away all the pain of his life.” The other old lady agrees, “Oh that is a really romantic gesture.” But, like most romantic gestures in rom-coms (i.e., showing up to someone’s door uninvited with a bunch of signs professing unwavering devotion or appearing outside someone’s room with a boom box blasting “In Your Eyes”), it’s objectively creepy and stalker-ish. Luckily for Sheila, she’s a woman, therefore can eke by a little more easily with her “dogged persistence” (not quite bordering on Swimfan territory).

To mildly offset Sheila’s mania about Gary, June serves as the only outlet for something like a “conscience” in the story. Because when Sheila offers to go back in time for her and make her parents love her (instead of seeing her as a “mistake” for being a girl), June claps back, “Don’t fuck with my trauma, Sheila. If I didn’t have these occasional moments of complete and total worthlessness, I wouldn’t have this sparkling sense of humor.” Perhaps Davidson would say the same.

As for his decision to pick this role, it’s obvious that he, like the filmmakers, wants so badly for Meet Cute to join the annals of those classic “walking and talking” movies (most overtly, the blueprint for all such types: Before Sunset). Especially walking and talking in New York. Unfortunately, the scenes of them walking along the Manhattan Bridge (where Sheila had planned to plummet to her death) recall the actually iconic walking scene shared by Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) in Blue Valentine. Furthermore, and likely to any modern filmmaker’s dismay, the walking and talking paired with making NYC look “dreamy” also harkens back to Alvy (Woody Allen) and Annie (Diane Keaton) and Isaac (Allen) and Mary (Keaton) in Annie Hall and Manhattan, respectively. Except, rather than the (Ed Koch) Queensboro Bridge displayed in the latter, Alex Lehmann uses the far “chicer” Williamsburg Bridge as his source for romanticizing the city (before homing in on the Brooklyn Bridge, along with Jane’s Carousel next to it), and the idea that “anything” can happen in this town when it comes to love. Even half-cooked time travel-related encounters. Or “meet-cutes,” if you will.

Alas, there’s nothing cute about Sheila’s amplifying displays of desperation as she shouts at Gary, “You don’t understand. You saved me. This whole night saved me… It could be the only thing that ever makes me happy.” Hence, her unwillingness to risk allowing the relationship to be further explored in the next day—indicating the progression of time, ergo the inevitability of their dissatisfaction with each other (or, more likely, Gary’s dissatisfaction with her).

As we finally get to the drawn-out conclusion, it’s impossible not to note that just as the beginning of the movie tongue-in-cheekly wielded Lauren Spencer-Smith’s rendition of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” so, too, does the end of Meet Cute offer a tailored-to-the-situation song: Damien Jurado’s “The Shape of a Storm.” And while the lyrics, “Strange as it seems, I have known you before” play heavy-handedly, the two walk against the backdrop of the bridge, as so many couples before them, both onscreen and off, have done. So in the end, “unique” meeting story or not, they’ve become just another bad cliché.

Incidentally, Pnueli’s next film, Deborah, is also centered around a time loop premise, albeit with what seems like a somewhat more Lord of the Flies meets Bodies Bodies Bodies type of slant. One can only hope she’s learned from the mistakes made in Meet Cute, which serves as but a botched attempt at contributing to the New York Is Purgatory genre recently jump-started by Russian Doll.