Review: Results

Love isn't easy. Loving yourself or loving someone else, someone who is their own roiling mess of fears, desires, and unreasonable expectations. Yet people try, even when they don't know how or why, and even as they're sabotaging themselves along the way.

Danny (Kevin Corrigan) has just been through a divorce and a sudden windfall of cash. He's a bit of a schlub and a whole lot of lonely, and money is his way of exerting control over his shapeless life. Money can get him his cable connected within minutes or a cat delivered to his front door, and money is what he uses to start on the road to self-improvement. That is where Kat (Cobie Smulders) comes in. She is a personal trainer, a testy and demanding sort who expects nothing less than total commitment from her clients. She gets herself assigned to be Danny's trainer over her boss Trevor's (Guy Pearce) objections. That's Kat - she always seems to get her way.

Though Danny genuinely gives exercise a go, he soon finds himself attracted to Kat. The attraction seems mutual when she makes the first move, but when Danny responds with a big romantic gesture, she shuts him down and swiftly removes herself from the situation. All of this has been mere prelude for the film's real cracked coupling: Kat and Trevor. Their relationship is defective at best, destructive at worst. Kat wants a real job and a real boyfriend, but her basic instinct is to recoil and repel whenever Trevor attempts to communicate with her. She scoffs at his dreams of expanding his gym to achieve a fitness nirvana, but she is the first one to promote his ideals during a dinner with his hero, Russian fitness giant Grigory (Anthony Michael Hall doing Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago).

Results shuffles along as Danny, Kat, and Trevor try to figure out how to open themselves up to each other and to themselves. Andrew Bujalski has never been one to overstate plot or drama; he sets up a situation and sits back as his characters pinball off one another in entirely unconventional ways. That loose approach can be both rewarding and unsatisfying. Results manages to be both, yet it never loses its appeal thanks to its leading trio.

Bujalski wrote Results with Corrigan, Smulders, and Pearce in mind. One can feel the ease with which the actors inhabit their characters. The roles play to their strengths, but it also makes one view the actors in a new light. Corrigan has made a career of being "that weird guy." Danny, on paper, is another one to add to the gallery. Yet there is a charm and warmth within that co-mingles with the uncouthness, an optimism beneath the depressed veneer. Pearce, a former competitive bodybuilder in his native Australia, might be the most relaxed he's ever been onscreen though he is portraying a man who may be sacrificing personal love for professional bliss. Smulders impresses as the inscrutable Kat, an extremely tricky character that she imbues with hard-edged intensity and just the slightest hint of softness.

Results

Directed by: Andrew Bujalski

Written by: Andrew Bujalski

Starring: Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders, Kevin Corrigan, Giovanni Ribisi, Anthony Michael Hall, Brooklyn Decker, Constance Zimmer, Tishuan Scott