Whenever Hollywood latches obsessively onto the oeuvre of a pop novelist du jour, the law of averages dictates that the ensuing spate of films can’t be all bad: More than a couple of those ’90s John Grisham-based potboilers were solid, while in “The Notebook,” we actually got one Nicholas Sparks movie that people remember two decades later. Four films in, however, we’re still waiting for the Colleen Hoover adaptation that makes her books’ vast popularity at all clear to the unconverted. A dunderheaded riff on “Rebecca” filtered through a Clinton-era erotic thriller aesthetic, “Verity” at least has a clearer narrative hook than the variously dull “It Ends With Us,” “Regretting You” and “Reminders of Him,” which have collectively racked up over half a billion dollars in the last two years. But it’s a flat-footed dud, at once overwrought and underplotted, and barely propped up by A-list stars who look either embarrassed, confused or indifferent to be there.
“Indifferent” mostly applies to Dakota Johnson, an actor whose signature passive screen presence (“I have resting bored face,” she says here, nailing one of the few self-aware lines in Nick Antosca’s script) can be an intriguing asset to the right film. Or even the wrong one: The coolly ironic air that she brought to the “Fifty Shades” trilogy presumably factored into her casting in “Verity,” a comparably lurid prospect that would dearly love those films’ general aura of scandal. But nobody can bring much intrigue to this ludicrous story of writers, ghost writers and soon-to-be-ghost writers, which labels and boldfaces its supposed ambiguities at every turn: not Johnson, not Josh Hartnett, and not the lately unavoidable Anne Hathaway, frozen in a role that demands little of her but glassy hauteur.
As for director Michael Showalter, who directed Hathaway to considerably livelier effect in the likable romantic comedy “The Idea of You,” “Verity” feels almost perversely ill-suited to his skill set. Schooled in comedy, he steers the film’s po-faced eroticism and high-camp melodramatic lurches so unsteadily that any laughs — and there are more than a few — remain of the unintended variety. Where Paul Feig’s audience-minded, up-for-anything spirit and Amanda Seyfried’s game slumming made “The Housemaid” a perfectly serviceable bit of multiplex pulp, “Verity” is all lacquer with no liftoff — haltingly paced and stilted in structure, it never feels energized even by the most absurd behavior of its characters.
There’s plenty of that to go around, too, beginning with a bizarrely grisly meet-uncute between Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson), a young novelist with acclaim but no sales to write home about, and slick realtor Jeremy Crawford (Hartnett). The two are on the same Manhattan street corner when a passing cyclist is hit and killed by a speeding vehicle — promptly spattering blood all over Lowen, just as she’s on her way to a meeting with her publisher. Gallantly helping her clean up in a nearby coffee shop, Jeremy offers her both his clean white shirt and some peculiarly chosen words of comfort: “I’ve seen worse… I pulled my eight-year-old girl’s body out of a lake.”
With this sequence of events, “Verity” may secure our attention, but immediately loses our belief. Who does that? Who says that? Who has no follow-up questions? And when Lowen walks into her meeting minutes later only to be reintroduced to Jeremy, who knew who she was all along, shouldn’t she have a few more? Turns out Jeremy is the husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford (Hathaway), whose most popular thriller series is dangling unfinished since a car crash that left her paralyzed and speechless the year before; her publishers are keen for someone to finish the job, and Lowen fits the bill. Despite her initial misgivings, she accepts the commission — and promptly moves into the Crawford family’s plush lakeside home to get started. (Why, exactly? Oh, never mind.)
Cue pretty much all the uneasiness you’d expect from a stranger moving in with a family recovering from not one but two recent tragedies — but Lowen’s snooping does yield the manuscript of a seemingly secret memoir being written by Verity shortly before her accident, so it’s all worth it. Narrated by Hathaway in arch, Transatlantic-accented voiceover, the memoir flashes back to how she met Jeremy, how she became a writer, and how postpartum depression put paid to their married idyll — but not all of this is how Jeremy, who puts the moves on Lowen more or less from the get-go, tells it.
Who to believe? Whose truth is the truth? And honestly, who really cares either way? After a whole lot of wintry lifestyle porn and surreptitious stalking down soft-carpeted corridors, “Verity” takes more than an hour to reach so much as a low boil, but its twists are second-guessed and double-bluffed to death, even as Showalter punctuates certain revelations with literal thunderclaps in the background. It’s all more muted and anticlimactic than you’d want or expect from a film where Dakota Johnson gets to call a wheelchair-bound Anne Hathaway “a selfish Machiavellian cunt,” and never remotely sexy, despite two characters’ best efforts in the back of a limo, and a masturbation scene in a rock-carved bathtub that mostly looks uncomfortable for all concerned.
Amy Williams’ production design looks as expensive as the A-list leads, and composer Volker Bertelmann — even more ubiquitous than Hathaway in the movies this year — throws in some zithery Bernard Herrmann stylings. But the film hardly even merits such empty pastiche, and there’s little else to distinguish it from much cheap-and-cheerful streaming fodder in this genre space. “The words should comes directly from the center of the gut,” says Verity of her own writing philosophy at one point. “They should be ugly and honest and bloody and a little bit terrifying, but completely exposed.” “Verity” is none of these things, save perhaps from some part or other of the gut; if Colleen Hoover’s writing bears any of those qualities, meanwhile, Hollywood is doing a good job of hiding it.
By: Guy Lodge
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