When Lucy loses her job in a gallery (run by the eerily ageless Bernadette Peters), she volunteers to help Nick fix up the hotel, especially when she hits on an idea to create an installation there that exhibits totems, both from her own collection and other people’s, from her now dissolved romances. The wreck he’s still trapped in is a former YMCA that he’s painstakingly refurbishing by hand to turn it into a boutique hotel, with an assist from builder friend Marcos (Arturo Castro). The prince she saves from a near shipwreck is Nick (Dacre Montgomery of Stranger Things, like Viswanathan doing a bang-up job of disguising his natural Australian accent), an affable Everybro sort of guy who goes along with it when Lucy mistakes him for a ride-share driver. “I live in a cave of souvenirs,” she tries to explain to her friends in the opening scene. Her bedroom in the apartment she shares with Nadine and Amanda is chock-full of the stuff, a personal quirk that’s either a sign of hoarding monomania or kind of cute. We’re talking plastic cups and wrinkled but unopened condom packets, all mementos of all the failed relationships Lucy has ever been in. Indeed, the only thing that is a problem for Lucy is her inability to let go of stuff - literally. Ethnicity and sexual preference are never a problem, never challenging, which is lovely but also a little weird in its frictionless utopianism. Lucy, for instance, is obviously of South Asian descent, but that’s no more a matter to be discussed than her generous bust size, the Jewishness of her friend Amanda (Molly Gordon) or their other friend Nadine’s (Phillipa Soo from Hamilton) preference for dating women, especially Russian models. He slides by a charity worker as if she were no more interesting than a panhandler or a fire hydrant Lucy, even though she’s in a rush to keep up with Max, actually stops to sign the petition because it’s for Planned Parenthood.Ī few more of those kinds of spiky, risky gags would have been welcome, especially as it sometimes feels as if the film has had all its edges sanded down by either real or internalized test screenings and focus groups to make it as broadly appealing as possible. For example, there’s a low-key pursuit at one point, where our heroine Lucy (vivid, effervescent Geraldine Viswanathan of Blockers and Hala) hotfoots it to catch up with ex-boyfriend Max (Utkarsh Ambudkar) in the streets. Nevertheless, there are a few charming moments when Krinsky wittily tweaks expectations.
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