10 Years Blu-ray Review
You can go home again—but do you want to?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 4, 2013
High school reunions are frequently bittersweet affairs at best. I personally only ever had the courage to go to one of
mine, the same vaunted tenth anniversary celebration that is at the heart of
10 Years. I had already long ago
moved from the city where I had gone to high school, but had been asked back by my parents to housesit their home (and
dog) for a few weeks that summer, so I decided to drop down to my reunion to see what various friends had done with
their lives in the intervening decade. I knew I wasn't going to stay very long, for all they were serving for dinner was
roast beef, and I was (and am) a vegetarian, but I came to the little mixer before dinner and caught up with at least a few
of my old acquaintances. Some of them were quite accomplished—attorneys, authors, successful businessmen and
women—while others seemed to already be in a state of decline from which they were unlikely to recover. There were
shocking elements as well, including one of the big football jocks of my senior year who was now almost completely
sidelined by multiple sclerosis. Such are the vagaries of fate, and even if intimations of mortality aren't exactly on the front
burner of most 28 year olds' minds, there's perhaps the first real inkling that time is a precious commodity, and it's best
not to waste to much of it, that comes from attending a reunion like this. Overt philosophizing isn't exactly on the front
burner of this
film's mind, but it's an agreeable enough ensemble comedy that features a number of winning
performances if an absolute dearth of depth or inquisitiveness into what it is about reunions that is both bracing and more
than a little terrifying.
Now I must disclose up front I'm rather far removed from the late twenties demographic which would seem to be the
target audience for
10 Years, but even putting aside that generational issue, there's something somewhat akin
to
Friends at work throughout this film.
10 Years congregates a bunch of impossibly good looking twenty-
somethings, some of whom are impossibly successful (including a rock star), and all of whom talk in that over arch,
impossibly hip and happening way that seems to only occur in movies (and occasional long running sitcoms). To
10
Years' credit, writer-director Jamie Linden attempts to invest these characters with some verisimilitude, even if most
of
them are painted with overly broad brush strokes which offer only general outlines and few if any finer details.
The film is by its very nature an anecdotal affair, giving us quick glimpses into the rather large and ungainly of
characters. Channing Tatum portrays Jake, a mortgage broker who has arrived at the reunion with his girlfriend Jess
(Tatum's real life wife Jenna Dewan-Tatum), whom he is planning on asking to marry him "when the time is right". That
time may or may not be pushed off when Jake's high school flame Mary (Rosario Dawson) shows up unexpectedly.
10 Years defies expectations itself with several nice little turns as this particular reunion unfolds. First of all
Mary
seems at least to be happily married, and Jake
seems to be poised to propose, making an
assignation between the two
seemingly impossible. How many films have
you seen, though, where the
guy's putative fiancée is a harridan and the woman's husband is a thundering dolt, making a hookup between the long
ago lovers an all but sure bet.
10 Years defies all of these clichés with refreshing honesty, if not an incredible
amount of depth.
The rest of the sprawling cast includes everyone from Justin Long to Oscar Isaac to Kate Mara to the "local couple"
more or less hosting all the influx of visitors, played by Chris Pratt and Ari Graynor. Here Linden cheats just a little,
giving us glancing blows of character, whole lives delivered in shorthand and supposedly off the cuff comments by
various people about each other that are too on the nose to be anything other than highly scripted dialogue. But again
Linden pulls back from falling too far down the well of cliché, managing to invest many of these characters (especially
Pratt's penitent bully) with some really distinctive little beats. The fairy tale love story of the rock star (Isaac) and the
girl he mooned for from afar in high school (Mara) seems like it's going to be the most predictable of the bunch, and if
there's something approaching a happy ending (in every sense of that term), it's also colored with a certain melancholy
that somehow makes it more real.
Channing Tatum also served as one of the producers on
10 Years, obviously now starting to stretch his filmic
wings now that his superstardom seems all but assured. Tatum the actor here is generally pretty understated, but he
works well with his wife and doesn't grandstand, especially laudable considering the fact that he's probably the "it-est"
of the "it" cast. Dawson has some nice moments as well, especially in a nice little beat at the film's end when we get
just a glimmer of what's really going on behind Mary's optimistic eyes.
10 Years coasts on a rather large amount of charisma generated by its aforementioned "it" cast, but it can only
get
so
far on that kind of glamour, and when Linden resorts to drunken confessions and the like, the film tends to lose some of
its luster. Still,
10 Years is rather remarkably error free in its own low key, small scale way. It's a bit too self
aware for its own good, rather like its subject age group, and some of the dialogue is a bit too convenient to ring very
true, but there's a certain honesty at the core of this film that makes it one of those rare high school reunions you might
not dread attending.
10 Years Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
I frankly didn't expect much from
10 Years, but its lack of pretension helped to overcome its similar lack of ambition.
This is little more than a glorified sitcom (or perhaps dramedy), but the cast is extremely winning and Jamie Linden marshals
his forces very well, spreading around the action between a rather large cast and delivering some gentle punch lines as
well as some equally gentle emotion along the way.
10 Years probably could have been sharper and more involving
had its cast size been cut, or had Linden spent a little more time letting us get to know each of the reunion participants, but
even in this kind of haphazard sketch format, the film works a perhaps surprisingly large amount of the time. Image quality
here is okay, nothing more, nothing less, while the audio is generally excellent if similarly not very exciting. The
supplemental material is virtually nonexistent, but for Tatum fans or those who do fit this film's demographic (or maybe
those who
wish they did),
10 Years comes
Recommended.
