“All the stuff you do makes you a not very nice person,” Kristen Bell understates to Adam Brody in this adaptation of a minor Neil LaBute play. The same could, obviously, be said of LaBute, who’s made his name with a slew of misanthropic plays and movies.
“Some Girl(s),” directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer from a LaBute screenplay, attains the occasional moment of clarity, but ultimately has neither the dramatic heft nor the anchoring talent to justify an hour and a half in the company of a boring sociopath.
Brody is an unnamed, successful magazine writer who, on the eve of his marriage to a very nice girl, is flying around the country interviewing his former others — significant and not-so — in order to, as he repeatedly says, “right a wrong.” It quickly becomes clear that there have been countless wrongs, and just as clear that none of his exes is over him despite that fact.
I loved Brody on “The O.C.” — and some of the awkward, brainy chatterboxes he’s played since — but a ladykiller he is not. When he says he’s sorry, he sounds like he really means it. How did this guy ever lie this many women into bed and then leave them flat — yet still wanting more?
When he gets to Emily Watson’s older professor, with whom he had a torrid affair, the lack of sexual chemistry just makes the whole thing squirmingly uncomfortable — and her demand that he sleep with her while her husband knowingly waits in the car outside, as punishment, rings false.
You wonder why any of these women would even give him the requested time slot: Jennifer Morrison, the high school sweetheart, is happily married with kids — but hating herself after an hour with this man. Mia Maestro’s sexually confident Tyler is knocked down several pegs after he rebuffs her seduction attempts.
Zoe Kazan stands out as a young woman who angrily confronts the writer for inappropriately kissing and touching her when she was a preteen. Her description of the end of her youth at a fateful slumber party is the most emotionally real moment in the film.
Ultimately, the writer’s unflagging self-absorption is more tedious than telling. And, more frustrating, his interviewees have little more to do than ask him why he abandoned them, rather than telling him off for it. Are “Some Girl(s)” like this? Yes. But I left this movie with no additional insight on why.