Peter Gallagher speaks the following line in the new movie by CW actor Ryan Eggold: “Don’t dick me around, guy. We are on a strict deadline. ‘Nature Calls with Orson Schwartzman’ waits for no man.” Gallagher is playing Orson Schwartzman, the fictional host of that fictional nature show. Now, you don’t have Peter Gallagher show up in your movie for three minutes, give him a name like “Orson Schwartzman,” and have him say the line “[d]on’t dick me around, guy. We are on a strict deadline. ‘Nature Calls with Orson Schwartzman’ waits for no man,” only to have him disappear for the rest of the movie, do you? Apparently Ryan Eggold does.
What, you ask, does Eggold choose to focus on instead of the performance of Peter Gallagher’s lifetime? Justin Long.
“Literally, Right Before Aaron” is about this real jerk named Adam (Long), who has a quarter-life-crisis when his ex-girlfriend calls to invite him to her wedding. Cobie Smulders plays the ex, Allison. Her new fiance, Aaron (get it?) is played by Ryan Hansen.
Characters make a lot of absurdly dumb decisions in this movie. To start with, Cobie Smulders calls this guy she dated for eight years and broke up with a year ago to invite him to her wedding to Ryan Hansen. This, which is hardly believable to begin with, still makes no sense by the time the movie is over.
The first real introduction we have to Adam as a character is a date he goes on with his new girlfriend Julie, played by Briga Heelan (Heelan has been developing a strange habit of showing up in projects lately as the — often mentally unbalanced — alternative to the female lead, in efforts such as Demitri Martin’s “Dean” and Netflix’s “Love”). Adam had learned of Allison’s engagement just before his dinner date with Julie, and he’s having something of a nervous breakdown.
The date plays out as follows: Adam painstakingly convinces Julie to marry him (by which I mean he pressures her into saying yes). Then he cruelly and inexplicably breaks up with her. This is the first hint we get that Adam is a really, really bad guy.
Other hints to this effect pop up in flashbacks to Adam and Allison’s relationship. We see their first meeting, wherein Adam sort of harasses Allison, this random girl he sees in a library, into going on a date with him (they walk through a park talking about how gross the word “moist” is. Parenthetically, I think we need a moratorium on observational humor relating to the relative grossness of the word “moist” in movies and TV going forward).
Bizarrely, and for no reason whatsoever (other than masochism), Adam decides to attend Allison’s wedding — rehearsal dinner and all. Eventually, things go south for all involved. Through a series of insane and selfish decisions, Adam ends up ruining the wedding weekend (the film takes the position that this is okay because it helps him get over Allison).
Neither Long nor Smulders are bad in this movie, giving the performances you’d expect, and they each get a few moments to do some genuinely good work. I’m just not entirely sure if Eggold and/or Long understand just how awful a person Adam is. The choices he makes throughout the film, but especially toward the finale, paint a picture of a deeply selfish, entitled, petulant child. Good movies — great movies — have been made about such characters, but by filmmakers who are aware of their character’s flaws. “Literally, Right Before Aaron” demonstrates some, but not quite enough, self-awareness of the most obvious fact that Adam is a shitty dude.
Aaron, Allison’s new fiance, is the primary antagonist of the film. Adam decides that he has to break the new couple up so he can get back with Allison; the movie then plays out as if Aaron is a bad guy who would be bad for Allison. No evidence to this effect is shown. Sure, Aaron is a douche. I wouldn’t want to hang out with him. But we never see him mistreat Allison — in fact, they seem to have affection for one another. All of this would be fine, except the movie never so much as hints that it’s in on any of it. It plays out as if Aaron was Bradley Cooper in “Wedding Crashers.”
Ryan Hansen is fine here. He’s funny in a lot of bad movies (see “Jem and the Holograms”) but he’s yet to top his performance in “Party Down.” Meanwhile, it’s not just Peter Gallagher who shows up for just a scene or two and then mysteriously vanishes. Here are some more notable people who appear in this movie (none of whom have more than five-minutes total screen time): Malcolm Barrett (he shows up for a few minutes to unabashedly dump exposition on our heads), Dana Delaney (I’d be shocked if she was in this movie for more than 60 seconds), Kristen Schaal (please stop doing this to Kristen Schaal, people), and John Cho (playing the Bill Hader in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” role).
Oh, and Luis Guzman. That’s right, folks, “Literally, Right Before Aaron” has facilitated the long-awaited on-screen reunion of Luis Guzman and Justin Long. We’ve been “Waiting” for too long (see what I did there? It’s a reference to the horrendous 2005 comedy “Waiting…” starring, among others, Luis Guzman and Justin Long!) And what a reunion it is. Like all of the other cast members who are not named Justin Long or Cobie Smulders, Guzman has maybe three or four minutes of screen time total. He plays a janitor, I think. I can barely remember. He’s basically not in this movie.
“Literally, Right Before Aaron” is a strange piece of work. It has an inexplicably contemplative end-credits sequence that is so wildly out of sync with the rest of the film as to be laughable. The moral of the story seems to be that it’s okay to be a giant, destructive asshole if it helps you move on from an ex. It’s tonally confused to the point of incoherence.
It does have one thing going for it: perhaps my favorite example of “line-of-dialogue-from-the-movie-as-the-movie’s-title” ever. At the wedding, someone says “Adam and Allison used to go out.” Someone else asks when that was. Guy shoots back, “literally, right before Aaron.” It’s off-the-cuff and naturalistic in a way that is surprising and funny for a movie titled “Literally, Right Before Aaron.” I like this movie’s title. See, it’s not all bad. [C]