© LANDMARK MEDIA / ALAMY
Most people would agree that the 2011 film One Day was a let-down. The adaptation of David Nicholls’s much-adored novel starred Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway as Dexter and Emma, who meet on their final day of university in 1988, nearly have a one-night stand and then spend the next decade pining after each other at all the wrong moments. The novel checks in with the pair on the same day each year— 15th July—up until 2007. At the end, something shocking happens, which I won’t spoil here, that has divided readers since the book came out in 2009.
I’m not surprised One Day didn’t work as a film. Dex was too unlikeable, Emma too perfect. It also came in the middle of the bizarre cultural moment when people decided that Hathaway, a perfectly niceseeming, beautiful woman who took her job seriously, was hateful for some reason. But the main problem, to my mind, was the film’s pacing. It tried to include too much— inevitable, with so many years to cover—and still ended up feeling thin. In a recent interview with Slate, the director, Lone Scherfig, admitted that a different format was probably more appropriate, saying, “I think it could work a lot better as episodic television.”