Teenage dreams often run the gamut of henpecked fantasies— running away in order to find romantic freedom and riches. Shana Feste’s “Endless Love” arrives to add to the conversation of romantically idealized adventures. It just doesn’t help that this particular story is so garishly overplayed and obliviously idiotic.
“Endless Love” begins on the day of a high school graduation. David Elliot (Alex Pettyfer, “I Am Number Four”) picks Jade Butterfield (Gabriella Wilde, “Carrie”) out of the crowd of blue-capped graduates, saying that he’s been watching her since the 10th grade. Now that the problematic and supposedly poetic stalker dialectic has been established, “Endless Love” sets forth on bringing these two lovebirds together in increasingly predictable and lumbering circumstances.
Jade comes from a wealthy background and keeps herself cloistered within the company of books, however there is no evidence that she might actually care for books since she never holds one during the entire film. Her father, Huge Butterfield (Bruce Greenwood, “Star Trek”), wishes for her daughter to become a pre-med student, nabbing Jade a lucrative internship with a doctor. Naturally, complications arise, old memories are dredged up and dark pasts come to light when David steps into frame. Their love is too strong, some might claim that it’s even endless, and wrenches fly about into other people’s plans.
It might seem unfair to pick on “Endless Love” and a valid argument could be put forth that it’s a romantic film aimed at a certain audience. This would be commendable if the objective of a romantic film was to only aim so low.
But the panoply of romance cinema from screwball comedies like “My Man Godfrey” and “Trouble in Paradise” down the line to Nora Ephron’s snappy wit in “When Harry Met Sally” and James Ponsoldt’s “The Spectacular Now,” the romance genre have proven results of subversive staying power and quality. “Endless Love” settles for restless platitudes and an unfit product description when greatness is no further from one’s fingertips than a well worn Netflix account.
Feste (“The Greatest”), no stranger to pedestrian films with large prestige casts, seems to kowtow to the whims of Joshua Safran, Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz, all alumni of the writer and production halls of CW’s “Gossip Girl.” “Endless Love” has the same cynical construction as the worst of CW’s programing and none of the raw meat that “Gossip Girl” so often had in its earliest episodes.
A word on Greenwood, who arguably has the most challenging role of playing a man in the midst of an existential crisis, controlled and tempted into vice and infidelity by an unseen force, namly from falderal writers, but he can do nothing to discern where this influence is coming from. Viewed from this perspective, “Endless Love” is a masterpiece of Kafka-esque proportions, but it’s not that. Pettyfer’s character is a single-celled protozoan with zero personality and Wilde is too pretty to have been cast as loner.
The flip side is that “Endless Love” has an exemplary soundtrack, though most of the film acts as no more than a music video with nondescript talking parts in between. Then why not stick with that format? The love might not be endless, audiences have to leave at some point, but there may have been a reason why music video characters don’t have many opportunities to talk. “Endless Love,” abides in limited stock and thrills.
