Addition Review
There’s a little bit of heart in the formula for this Aussie-set rom-com.
Grace (Teresa Palmer) counts numbers incessantly, in an effort to hold her world together. But a chance encounter with Seamus (Joe Dempsie) leads her to take a chance on love; throwing her world upside down in the process.
Addition struggles to shake off, perhaps, the shackles of the nation in which it comes from. There are little fingerprints that tell you it’s an Aussie film; an overly complicated plot with a raft of extraneous side characters, plenty of ‘inclusion’, and perhaps a touch too much in making it look amazing.
It’s when the makeup of Addition casts off these extra little elements, and focuses on what it should be - a good rom-com - that it works best.
There’s a lot of nuance and difficulty in this story, but the central conceit, of a woman with a mental illness that impedes, and ultimately implodes, her romantic life, is a strong one, and handled well. At least, up until that implosion. Teresa Palmer does an OK job in the lead, but Joe Dempsie as her erstwhile lover is far and away the standout. And they have a good chemistry, aided by some wonderfully strong dialogue from Becca Johnstone and Toni Jordan’s script.
The problem with Addition - outside of the trappings already identified - fundamentally comes down to the structure. Whereas one might imagine a typical structure where the romantic leads break up after some complication caused by Grace’s illness, but are brought back together again, this film tries to eschew that - to some extent - in favour of a more complex, interweaved storyline that never quite takes off. While there is a complication, it feels incredibly rushed because of all of the disparate elements the filmmakers are trying to cram in here (including a Tesla apparition, a tragic backstory, and a niece discovering her sexuality).
When we should be rooting for Grace and Seamus to put aside their differences and get back together, instead we’re treated to a rapid ‘fixing’ of Grace’s illness by a therapist in a deus ex machina way, a shoehorned in plot with Grace’s niece confiding her secrets in her, and a hurried makeup between the actual characters we care about. It’s too many numbers to add up to a satisfying film.
Which is a shame, because the back and forth banter, the meet cute, the challenges of their relationship and the genuine chemistry between the two actors in the lead relationship is really strong. Some of these lines are laugh out loud funny, even for the jaded critic. But spreading it so thin, because the screentime is being used for this ‘complex’ backstory, does a disservice to what we’re actually interested in here - how do two people find a way to make their love work in the face of such adversity?
There are great ideas captured here, and the film stands strong as a slightly more complex rom-com in a country that produces very few of those, but it is made all the more bittersweet to see it stumble in the third act, when the relationship it had started to build felt so strong; until it got distracted by other plot threads.
