Movies

‘Barefoot’ is an unbearable romantic comedy

He’s a rebellious trust-funder who specializes in strip clubs, one-night stands and gambling debts. She’s a possibly schizophrenic mental patient raised in near-captivity by an abusive mother. How could these two kids not fall in love?

Mopping floors at a mental hospital as part of his probation, Jay (Scott Speedman) busts Daisy (Evan Rachel Wood) out of the ward to act as his date at his brother’s wedding, so he can curry favor, and money, with his perennially disappointed dad (Treat Williams). What could possibly go wrong?

Dealing queasily in the kind of cutesy mental illness we haven’t missed from the days of “Benny and Joon,” director Andrew Fleming (“Nancy Drew”) squanders the talents of Speedman and Wood — hers the particularly onerous part, requiring her to act in completely contradictory ways from scene to scene, and to utter truly cringe-worthy lines like “I have to go big potty.” With any luck, this’ll be the death knell of the idiot-savant rom-com.