Going the Distance Isn't Worth the Short Trip to the Video Store

Last week, a coworker recommended the movie Going the Distance to me. I’d never seen it advertised, but I liked the leads, Justin Long and Drew Barrymore, well enough, and I found the premise interesting. When I sat down to watch it with my parents, I warned them of the R rating; my dad only lasted five minutes. Mom and I stuck it out, but when all was said and done, we wished we hadn’t.

In this 2010 romantic comedy written by Geoff LaTulippe and directed by Nanette Burstein, Garrett (Long) is newly single. He goes out to drown his sorrows in a beer with his buddies, and in the process, he meets Erin (Barrymore), an aspiring journalist in New York on a newspaper internship. Their meeting would be cute if it weren’t so profane – and if I could describe this movie in one word, “profane” would be it.

Every single conversation is riddled with an absurd amount of foul language, most of it sexually loaded. It doesn’t help that this relationship begins with physical intimacy. He’s just been dumped; she’s headed back to the West Coast soon. They’re both tipsy. You don’t have to be a prude like me to think this isn’t a great idea. Still, there is a core of sweetness to the relationship that develops between them.

The trouble is that half the movie is taken up with gratuitous dialogue that doesn’t advance the story and isn’t nearly as funny as LaTulippe thinks it is. And if you cut all that out, you’d reveal a pretty flimsy plot. It’s as though he ran out of ways to depict a long-distance romance on screen, so he tried to mask the lack of creativity with crudeness.

Among the several side characters, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis provide perpetual potty-mouthed prattle as Garrett’s buddies. I admit to mild amusement at Dan’s attempts to “DJ” Garrett and Erin’s “hookup” with music from Top Gun, but even that was as grating as it was funny. Christina Applegate was too abrasive to be convincingly affectionate as Erin’s sister. I did find her low-key husband Phil (Jim Gaffigan) entertaining, but I still cringed during several scenes involving him.

With technological advances helping contribute to an increase in long-distance relationships, there’s certainly room in the market for a movie like this. As it stands, I felt much more invested in the deep friendship, achieved solely through old-fashioned correspondence, depicted in the Anne Bancroft-Anthony Hopkins drama 84 Charing Cross Road than in this romance, though the bi-coastal parties spend more time in the movie physically together than apart.

It’s a shame, because there’s a nugget of a sweet and engaging story there. But I sure don’t recommend watching Going the Distance with your parents. Or at all.