Other Negative Elements
As teenagers, Emma tells Adam, �People aren’t made to be together forever.� Alvin never takes his own good advice. Nor does he change his self-focused ways.
Conclusion
At first blush No Strings Attached appears to be just another typical boy-meets-loves-loses-gets-girl romantic comedy. The script shuffles in with some medium chuckles. The stereotypical roles are filled by attractive Hollywood hunks and honeys. And the happy ending is recognizably formulaic.
The difference here, we soon find out, is that this particular romcom is draped over the hanger of friends who become casual sex partners-rather than the other way around.
�Emma wants a relationship without the relationship,� actress Natalie Portman told Fox News. �She just wants the sex. It’s unusual but funny. I love romantic comedies, but I’m tired of seeing girls who want to get married all the time and that’s all they’re interested in. I think there is a wider vision of how women can conduct their lives and what they want.�
Apparently screenwriter Elizabeth Meriwether and director Ivan Reitman agree. And so their film sports a grinning anomie, showcases uninhibited trysts, and doesn’t blush a bit about the sex-and-go worldview it supports amidst one-liners and love-lost sighs.
It does at least come around to mildly admitting that it can be difficult to have noncommittal sex without a few pesky emotions getting in the way. And it speculates that adults who pursue a me-centered life will negatively impact themselves and their offspring. But it certainly doesn’t suggest that you should change your ways. In fact, if anything, there’s a much more focused encouragement here for young and old alike to find their own dating transgenderdate paths through the �no rules/new rules� of dating and sexuality.
�I think this movie does point out, though, that we have to stop acting like casual sex isn’t happening, and start to be realistic about what a modern courting relationship is like,� Kutcher told hollywoodnews.
Of course, the actor did go on to admit that his �realistic� viewpoints don’t always translate to how he runs his own home. �My youngest daughter just went on a date with a kid,� Kutcher continued. �I made him come in. He said hello. He walked her to the door at the end of the night and did all the right things. So that gives me hope.�
There’s nobody who plays Ashton Kutcher quite like Ashton Kutcher and, in this pleasant and undemanding romcom, he plays another cute guy whom all the girls (and boys of course) swoon over. This time he’s Adam, the sweet and rather vulnerable twentysomething son of Kevin Kline’s rascally-old-devil father, who’s three-times divorced, still doing drugs, and chasing young women as his 60th birthday looms.
In fact, it’s that paternal girl-chasing on which this initially episodic film turns after we have met Adam and Emma (Natalie Portman) at several points in their lives – first as teenagers at summer camp, then a college frat party, and lastly when they bump into each other at a farmers’ market in Los Angeles, the city where she is studying to be a doctor and he is an assistant television producer with hopes of becoming a writer.
Shortly after that chance meeting, Adam finds out that his dad is dating his recent ex-girlfriend, and he goes on a bender. Late into the evening he texts Portman (recently Oscar-nominated for a vastly different role in Black Swan but who won’t be troubling the Academy in this much lighter fare, which she executive-produced), and spends the night at her apartment.
