Director – Alex Lehmann, Screenplay – Noga Pnueli, Producers – Akiva Goldsman, Santosh Govindargiu, Gregory Lessans, Dan Reardon & Rachel Reznick Wizenberg, Photography – John Matysiak, Music – Stephen Lukach, Visual Effects – Baked Studios (Supervisor – George A. Loucas), Special Effects Supervisor – Eugene Hitt, Production Design – Laura Miller. Production Company – Weed Road Pictures/Convergent Media/The Exchange/Anamorphic Media/Maven Pictures/Three Point Capital/Annis Investments/Summerland Entertainment/Federal Films//Sprokefeller Pictures.
Cast
Kaley Cuoco (Sheila), Pete Davidson (Gary), Deborah S. Craig (June), Kevin Corrigan (Phil the Bartender), Rock Kohli (Amit)
Plot
Sheila meets Gary in a Brooklyn bar where they immediately hit it off and go out to dine and wander the streets together. During the course of this, Sheila tells Gary that she is a time traveller and that she has been coming back to visit this evening, the one perfect moment in her life, and has met him numerous times before. He treats this with incredulity. On successive returns, Sheila tells how she was suicidal until she found a nail salon that had a tanning bed that was a time machine that allowed a person to travel back in time but only for 24 hours. In an effort to try and fix Pete, she uses the time machine to go back and heal issues in his childhood, but her constant returns to this night start to become obsessive.
Meet Cute was the fifth film for director Alex Lehmann who first appeared with the documentary Asperger’s Are Us (2016) and went on to the romantic film Blue Jay (2016), the drama Paddleton (2019) and the SF film Acidman (2022). The film comes with a script by Noga Pneuli, who around the same time as this directed and wrote the very similar SF film Deborah (2022) about a group of friends who use a device to rewind time, although with less romantic effect than we see here.
I was put off watching Meet Cute by the Romantic Comedy label. I have to confess I am not a huge fan of the genre. But I shouldn’t have judged a book by its genre labelling as the reality is that Meet Cute is a considerable delight. It has a snappy and energetic script that gains a great deal of life from its two performers.
Meet Cute has a reasonable similarity to a couple of a handful of other romantic comedies with time travel themes – About Time (2013) in which Domhnall Gleeson tries to engineer the perfect romance with Rachel McAdams; Time Freak (2018) where Asa Butterfield creates a time travel device and uses it to change past mistakes and reunite with Sophie Turner after she breaks up with him; When We First Met (2018) where Adam Levine goes back in time to win the girl who turned him down; and Save State (2023) where Gabriel Fries uses a ten minute window to keep returning and persuade Jessie Carl not to leave him. You could even point to Groundhog Day (1993) where Bill Murray uses the occasion of being trapped in a timeloop in the same day to create the perfect date with Andie McDowell.
Pete Davidson and Kaley Cuoco on their walk around Brooklyn
The pairing of Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson works extremely well together. The two have a fantastic natural rapport and bounce off one another with an effortless energy where you are often quite sure that much of what is being said is improvised. They really do feel – in the initial scenes at least – like a couple who have just met and are connecting. The first scene they have together comes with just the right degree of lightness where you are not sure whether to take Kaley Cuoco’s comments about being a time traveller seriously.
But when you see the same scenario repeat itself with minute variations, things start to get interesting. About the time that Pete Davidson starts completing Kaley’s lines or mentioning where she grew before she does, you are going “wait a minute here” – although the freshness of the script is that this didn’t go where I thought it was going to with these scenes. Did I mention already that Meet Cute has an incredibly clever and witty script? It twists and turns around on itself in ways you do not expect, even offers an alternate timeline set of events after Kaley Cuoco does a little temporal tinkering on Pete Davidson’s childhood, all before it discovers a delightfully satisfying ending. Not to mention that Alex Lehmann has a great feel for the background life of the Brooklyn neighbourhood the film is set in.
Meet Cute is made through the pairing of its two leads. On The Big Bang Theory (2007-19), Kaley Cuoco seemed an average Hollywood starlet stuck in a standard dumb blonde role but in ironic quote marks and I never paid much attention to her. Although what does strike me as Meet Cute goes on is just what a needy and increasingly unbalanced lead character it is that she is playing. Similarly, Pete Davidson’s comedy routine did nothing for me while the whole stand-up comic turned actor thing can be hit-and-miss usually, but the film gives me a whole new appreciation of him as an actor. Here the two connect extremely well and give Meet Cute its life.
The film should not be confused with and is unrelated to Meet Cute (2022), a short-lived Bollywood romantic comedy anthology that also aired the same year.
