The other day, I got a mosquito bite on my left hand, just under my wedding ring, and it wasn’t half as irritating as the first 20 minutes of the marital ensemble comedy “I Do … Until I Don’t.”
That’s especially disappointing because the movie is the work of writer-director-star Lake Bell, whose hilarious and pointed 2013 directing and writing debut “In a World …” won the Sundance Film Festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. That movie, in which Bell played a voiceover actor trying to break into the big leagues of movie-trailer work, was funny and insightful — two qualities her new movie lacks.
Bell’s aim is to look at marriage as an institution — an institution, declares British documentarian Vivian Prudeck (Dolly Wells), that is crumbling at its foundations. Prudeck has arrived in Vero Beach, Fla., to make her next film, with the thesis that marriage should not be “’til death do us part,” but a seven-year contract with an option to renew.
Prudeck finds three couples whom she thinks will prove her thesis. They are:
• Longtime married couple Cybil (Mary Steenburgen) and Harvey (Paul Reiser), who frequently bicker about Cybil’s real-estate business and Harvey’s midlife-crisis motorcycle.
• Noah (Ed Helms) and Alice (played by Bell), happily married for seven years — though there are strains on their relationship, as the family’s window-blind business falters and the couple’s attempts at having a baby have been fruitless.
• Alice’s hippie sister Fanny (Amber Heard) and her longtime partner, Zander (Wyatt Cenac), free-spirited artist types who aren’t married, but have a son and have lived in an “open relationship” for 10 years.
Bell’s script runs her characters through some uncomfortable paces — the worst being the timid Alice’s brief foray as a sex worker. Eventually, and almost too late, things settle down and the characters are just allowed to talk to each other. It’s then the couples discover their common enemy: Vivian and her documentary.
As with “In a World…,” Bell benefits from having funny friends who will show up to be in her movie. Among the standouts in the ensemble are Helms as the sincerely exasperated hubby, Reiser and Steenburgen as the well-paired older couple, and particularly Wells (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”) as the opinionated and ethically challenged documentary maker.
Bell aims to say something profound about marriage in “I Do… Until I Don’t,” but nothing sticks the way her observations on feminism and father-daughter relationships in “In a World …” did. What both movies have in common is Bell’s ability to coax her cast to make even the outlandish moments feel authentic.
• • 1/2<br>’I Do… Until I Don’t’<br>Marriage goes under the microscope in this so-so sophomore effort from writer-director-actor Lake Bell.<br>Where • Broadway Centre Cinemas.<br>When • Opens Friday, Sept. 1.<br>Rating • R for sexual material and language.<br>Running time • 103 minutes.