Celeste & Jesse Forever – review

Andy Samberg is a comic rightly treasured for that funny and underrated movie Hot Rod, in which he played a teen stunt rider plagued with angst, who performed the immortal "dance of anger" in the forest. Here, Samberg stars in a tiresome, bittersweet relationship comedy with Rashida Jones, who has co-written the screenplay with her former partner Will McCormack. It is a long, sad and insidiously annoying film that finally becomes so wearing you can suffer the existential equivalent of hypoglaecemia, a spiritual blood-sugar loss that can only be repaired by snacking on something unpretentious (like Hot Rod). He and Jones are Jesse and Celeste, a married couple who have recently split with divorce pending, but are totally freaking their friends out by remaining inseparable best buds, complete with icky shared jokes and intimate giggles: we first see them in the car singing along to Lily Allen's Littlest Things. They date other people, of course – people whose utter karmic wrongness would under other circumstances be something to laugh about – but sooner or later the emotional pain of growing apart must begin. There are some nice moments, but it's unbearably self-conscious and nowhere does it resemble real life.