Rating: 1/5

Writer: Steve Adams
Director: James Keach
Cast: Rachel Bilson, Tom Sturridge, Richard Jenkins, Blythe Danner
Studio: Freestyle Releasing

Under the innocent guise of twee love story, James Keach’s WAITING FOR FOREVER achieves the nearly unthinkable – it makes “love” look equally as appealing as something more quantifiably “forever,” like life imprisonment, or hauling a boulder up a hill for eternity.

In the film, Tom Sturridge’s Will Donner has spent his entire young adult life obsessively pining for Rachel Bilson’s Emma. Friends since childhood, the two lost touch after Will and his brother Jim were orphaned in a freak train accident. Though Emma has moved on, Will has never forgotten her kindness in the wake of his loss, and though that may sound sweet, WAITING FOR FOREVER is about as sweet as a sauce pan filled with boiled bunnies.

The problem with films like WAITING FOR FOREVER is that love is not simply romanticized into something that most people will never experience – it’s turned into something no one would want to experience. Will is, quite literally, a hobo. A pajama-clad, train-jumping, ball-juggling vagrant whose living locations have been entirely determined by the movements of a girl who doesn’t even realize what he’s doing. Correct, Will has spent his late teens and early twenties following Emma around the country, without ever speaking to her. Surely the idea of an emotionally damaged hobo whose idea of professing love boils down to stalking isn’t appealing to most people, right? However, should this speak to you, hell, WAITING FOR FOREVER might be your new favorite film.

At the heart of WAITING FOR FOREVER’s latent awfulness is its very premise. Had Steve Adams’ script been trimmed down, cut to a story about a sad guy who never quite got over his first love, it may have been much more common, but it would have at least been palatable. As an actress, even Emma’s profession lends itself to distant observation – why couldn’t Will have lived his life, watching her on television, reminiscing over their childhood? Why did he have to creepily haunt her life for years on end, only to reveal himself back in their hometown, where he could have feasibly been waiting already? It could all be chalked up as being utterly ludicrous if it wasn’t also so phenomenally awful and bizarre.

It is also one of the ugliest films in recent memory – not just tonally and structurally, but also technically. Flashback sequences of the film are lensed to look like they’ve been put through some sort of Hipstamatic wringer, as if an iPhone had spit up what are supposed to be key sequences in our understanding of Will, Emma, and their bond. The rest of the film is equally as harsh to the eye – the sort of overblown and oversaturated wasteland that is to be expected from family films unearthed after years in an attic, not a professional motion picture.

WAITING FOR FOREVER attempts to find profundity by layering the nonsense – not content for Emma’s boyfriend Aaron (a disturbing Matthew Davis) to simply be wrong for Emma, he also has to harbor a dark secret that doesn’t reveal itself until late in the film, far past the time that anyone could reasonably be expected to care about its ramifications. Emma cannot simply be at home for a weekend – her father must be dying of cancer. As Richard Twist, veteran actor Richard Jenkins gets off with the only truly amusing lines of the entire film, but those have to happen while he’s looking utterly bewildered that he’s landed in such dreck and totally flummoxed by Blythe Danner’s performance as his wife, both unhinged and unsettling in what can only be regarded as a complete mistake.

Rachel Bilson does occasionally bring the only vestige of emotional truth to the entire project. When Will confesses just how he’s been living his life these many years, Bilson’s reaction is quite possibly the only understandable one in the film – she’s hurt and shocked and sad. It’s remarkable that WAITING FOR FOREVER doesn’t stoop to overwrought outbursts in this moment, instead letting Bilson use actual talent to convey something resembling a realistic response.

As a love story, WAITING FOR FOREVER is phenomenally creepy and often simply uncomfortable – a failure. As a film about mental illness, it’s a ham-fisted sham with no emotional sensitivity – again, a failure. It’s the sort of film that will make audiences wonder what film didn’t get made so that such an ugly, messy, horrible spectacle could be brought to their theaters instead.