I could bitch about the weak voiceover, which is used to explain away every emotion and action the actors and/or script don't have the strength to convey without a running commentary. I could waste my time and yours spelling out the surface flaws of this mediocre film, like the lack of charisma between its stars or the little improbabilities of the script ('cause most platonic roommates of the opposite sex - co-workers, no less - like to prance around the apartment in thong underwear and cute little baby tees … right?). After Jane stumbles across the aforementioned old cow/new cow theory, she thinks she has the explanation for men's supposed aversion to monogamy.
So she bunks out with another co-worker, serial womanizer Eddie (Jackman). Broken-hearted and reeling, Jane's also homeless after her plans to move in with Ray fall through.
What if the same theory applied to men? Judd plays Jane Goodale (har har), a TV producer who is quickly wooed then dropped by her boyfriend and co-worker, Ray (Kinnear, so plastic I half-expected Astro-Turf to sprout on that perfectly coiffed head). To order a copy go to a bull has mated once with a cow, he'll never go back to her, always choosing a new cow over the old. Just Like You by Nick Hornby is published by Viking (£16.99). It may not have fire in its belly, but it has great warmth in its heart. I don’t think there’s much in here to challenge or discomfit.īut why should there be? It is frequently funny, consistently engaging and it’s not primarily a sociological treatise or a satire: it’s a love story. Just Like You – as a comedy of class difference and of the soft racism of bien-pensant liberals – invites comparison with Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Ageand seems to me to lack some of that novel’s sharpness. On Brexit, he has Lucy decide: “The referendum was giving groups of people who didn’t like each other, or at least failed to comprehend each other, an opportunity to fight.” Does he tell us much that we don’t already know or think we don’t already know? On this I’m not sure. Hornby is surefooted around all these issues, amiable and forgiving. In the end, Joseph scandalises Lucy by revealing he ticked both boxes on the ballot paper, which really does show a class and generational divide. Half those countries are more racist than anyone here”) and his father, a scaffolder, becomes a fervent Leaver. Just because we’re black doesn’t mean we want to stay part of Europe. Joseph is candid about not being sure on the issue (“I thought you wanted us all to be British. Lucy’s social circle consists of people for whom voting Leave is inconceivable, possibly evil and certainly racist, but her school staffroom is more divided. Lucy worries about her ageing body Joseph is quick to pick up on any remark Lucy makes that suggests she’s conscious of his race.īy setting most of Just Like You in 2016, what’s more, Hornby stirs in that great exposer of fissures in class, race and generation: the Brexit referendum. Both are intensely sensitive to any sign that the other is conscious of what divides them. Joseph’s mother is none too keen on his dating a woman close to her own age and Joseph is none too keen on the two women meeting Lucy cringes as her friends (“graphic designers… publishers and independent film-makers”) patronise her new boyfriend a neighbour calls the cops on the black youth he sees loitering on Lucy’s doorstep late at night Joseph is mortified when he plays Lucy his new track and she toe-taps along to it like an encouraging mum.