Say why is more to the point. Why? Why? Why inflict on everyone this incredibly unfunny, un-insightful and annoying nonsense? Why put audiences through another example of that most insidious genre: the quirky-phoney modern-family dramedy? The story could be interesting, were it not for the fact that every part of its potential for satire was overlooked in favour of yuckily supportive sentimentality, with bits and pieces half-remembered from American Beauty and even, I suspect, Clueless. Keira Knightley plays an unemployed twentysomething who peaked in high school; a marriage proposal from her boyfriend causes a quarterlife crisis and under cover of attending some personal growth seminar out of town she winds up staying with a cool teen she has befriended called Annika (Chloé Grace Moretz) and kind of falling for Annika’s hot lawyer dad (Sam Rockwell). Nothing in this story is in any way amusing or plausible: it is a Frankenstein’s monster of indie-screenplay cliches, with a teeth-grating performance of intolerable gawkiness from Knightley.
