One Day Movie (2011)

With some people, we are destined to become lifelong friends. It can't be planned that way. Chance plays a role. There is an underlying harmony that persists despite the whims of fate. When childhood sweethearts marry after not seeing each other for 30 or 40 years, it makes perfect sense to me. The instinctive understanding is there. "One Day" is a film based on the David Nicholls best-seller about a boy and girl who graduate from the University of Edinburgh on July 15, 1988, and spend the night together.
Dexter (Jim Sturgess) is a twit. In the 1970s, he might have been known as a Hooray Henry. Emma (Anne Hathaway) is an earnest, hard-working girl. Dexter is upper-class. Emma is middle-class. Dexter goes into television production. Emma gets a job as a waitress in a Tex-Mex restaurant in London. Dexter becomes famous quickly and fades inexorably because there is really nothing there. Emma becomes obscure quickly and only gradually becomes successful because she persists in believing in herself and her gift for writing.
The film depends on a reliable fictional element, the redeeming power of the love of a good woman. Dexter is a superficial fool who descends through ever-lowering levels of humiliation on TV, cable and the Internet, until he has been reduced to a punchline. Emma stays her course. Her persistence and success are like a rebuke to Dexter. But it is important for us, and Emma, to realize that he is fundamentally a good person at heart — potentially.The movie tells their story in a palatable rom-com manner, much enriched by its locations in Edinburgh, London, Paris and elsewhere. Such characters never live in forlorn places. The film is carefully crafted to make even its sad moments seem not all that bad, and it modulates its progress toward happiness without unseemly haste. But it unfolds as it must: Every single joyous love story ends in death if you follow it long enough. The movies make life easier for us by usually stopping in the middle.