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Movie Review: 'I Do Until I Don't'

Writer-Director-Star Lake Bell delivers another low budget smash.

By Sean PatrickPublished 7 years ago 4 min read
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Lake Bell is quickly proving herself as a jack of all trades. She started her career in the role of the slightly less gorgeous best friend in movies before taking a major U-turn from pursuing movie stardom. When her What Happens in Vegas co-star Rob Corddry pitched the idea of the then web series Children's Hospital, it was an unlikely choice, one I’m sure her agent wasn’t exactly excited about. Then the series became a cult hit, earning a place on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup it showed Hollywood that Lake Bell was more than just the pretty face.

But Lake Bell wasn’t finished taking risks. In 2013, instead of making the move back to features or a full-time TV gig, she had plenty of options, Bell decided to cultivate a small budget and make a movie of her own in which she was writer, director, and star. In a World was a charming, delightful and highly original love story about a voice-over artist who dreams of getting that one big gig and become the first woman to utter the phrase that became a cliche of so many sci-fi action movies of the past In a World.

With the small budget, In a World became a solid hit and earned Lake Bell the capital to do more writing, directing and starring. This time her idea, called I Do Until I Don’t, was a bit more of a struggle. Having begun writing the screenplay immediately following the production and release of In a World, Lake began the story as a skeptical exploration of why people get married. The intent then was to deconstruct marriage and ask why this seemingly antiquated ritual was still a thing.

Then Lake met and fell in love with her husband Scott Campbell and they had two kids and the story, throughout this wonderful, if tumultuous time, evolved from a skeptical take to a more nuanced and thoughtful take on why people fall in love and the work it takes to stay in love.

In I Do Until I Don’t Lake Bell casts herself as Alice, a former artist turned co-owner of a Blinds Store with her husband Noah (Ed Helms). Alice is mousy and insecure but has a heavy appreciation for a documentary filmmaker named Vivian (Dolly Wells) who happens to be making her new documentary in Alice’s hometown of Vero Beach Florida. The documentary is based on Vivian’s theory that marriages should not be permanent but rather be a seven-year contract with options for renewal.

With her marriage struggling, Alice decides that she might be a good subject for her idol’s documentary. Joining her will be her free-spirited sister Fanny (Amber Heard) and Fanny's boyfriend Zander (comic genius Wyatt Cenac), who are in an open-relationship, or so they think, and an older couple, Cybil and Harvey played by Paul Reiser and Mary Steenburgen. Cybil and Harvey have been married for over 30 years and have been bickering for about that same length of time.

That’s all of the plot description that I will give you as so much of the pleasure of I Do Until I Don’t comes from watching this group of characters evolve. Bell as a writer does a wonderful job of challenging the preconceived notions of her characters before slowly upending in them in a series of terrifically warm and funny and unexpected scenes. Steenburgen and Reiser stand out as much as their much younger co-stars with Steenburgen delivering one of the best performances of her career.

Steenburgen and Reiser have a scene late in the film that is among my favorite scenes in any movie all year. That’s all the description you will get as I very much want you to see and experience this scene for yourself. It’s just wonderful. Really, each of these couples is given at least one truly great scene. For Bell and Helms, there is a getting drunk montage that is delightful while Heard and Cenac, despite playing what could be stock, space-cadet, stoner characters, have one of the most tender scenes in the movie.

Ed Helms is the secret weapon of I Do Until I Don’t. So often throughout Helms’ big screen career, he’s been typecast as a nebbishy doofus at the mercy of bigger, louder characters but always on the border of cracking up. Noah in I Do Until I Don’t is a rare moment for Helms to play entirely straight. He’s the voice of reason here and the casting is inspired as it’s yet another way of subverting audience expectations.

With I Do Until I Don’t, Lake Bell is now two for two as a director of warm, funny, thoughtful, nuanced, and very funny romantic comedy. While I hope that this film becomes a huge success for her sake, I also hope that she never leaves the shallow end of the budget world. You don’t need a big budget to make movies about human, flawed characters that also happen to be wildly funny and bright. I Do Until I Don’t is opening in limited release on September 1.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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