I’ll never forget the first time I saw Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s bleak drama about the end of the world. Two wealthy sisters, one depressive and the other well-adjusted, try to process the awful reality that a rogue planet is about to collide with the earth. In a final scene both poignant and terrifying, the older sister gathers up her young son and all three of them lie down on the lawn of their vast estate, holding one another as the planet fills the sky overhead. Behind them the treeline bursts into flame, and a great conflagration sweeps toward them, incinerating everything they’ve ever known or loved. “You know,” I thought, “this would make a great Steve Carell comedy.”
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And so it does. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the debut feature of writer-director Lorene Scafaria, takes place in the last three weeks before a giant asteroid destroys the earth, but this time the premise generates a clever comedy of manners. Or rather, lack of manners, since people seldom observe the social niceties when they’re about to die. To facilitate the plot, Scafaria fudges some of the practical implications of Armageddon—the airlines, the U.S. mail, and the cable news networks keep functioning long after you’d expect the workers there to have gone AWOL. But she fully engages the great behavorial and philosophical questions inherent in her story: what will seem important to people, and how will they choose to live their lives, when they know exactly how long they have left?
For some characters, though, the one they truly love is the person in the mirror. An early scene shows Dodge walking on a treadmill at his health club while a bodybuilder behind him works out with hand weights and admires himself in the floor-to-ceiling glass. Hedonism runs rampant: at a dinner party hosted by his friends Warren (Rob Corddry) and Diane (Connie Britton), every taboo goes out the window. Warren force-feeds his little daughter a martini (“Fight through the burn!” he barks), and Diane bursts into a room to announce, “Sarah and Dave brought heroin!” The portly Roache (Patton Oswalt) boasts to Dodge that since Deliverance blew up he’s had a different sex partner every day. When Dodge retreats from this bacchanal into the bathroom, Diane slips in behind him and kisses him on the lips. “You’re Warren’s,” Dodge protests in shock. “No, I’m not,” she replies. “Nobody is anybody’s anything anymore.”
Directed by Lorene Scafaria
