‘All I Wish’ With Sharon Stone Is A Derivative Romantic Comedy [Review]

Interspersed throughout Susan Walter’s “All I Wish” are a series of wildly jarring, totally inexplicable straight-to-camera monologues from the film’s various characters. One moment Sharon Stone’s Senna is flirting with Tony Goldwyn’s Adam, the next Ellen Burstyn is sitting in front of a black background talking about how every woman wishes for “better boobs.” These interstitials are demonstrative of an insecure filmmaker; rather than allow the film’s narrative to speak for itself, Walter has her characters simply state their feelings, philosophies, and theses. One might even hazard a guess that the film’s talking-head motif was developed in post-production, when it became clear that the film wasn’t coming together on its own.

“All I Wish” (which, strangely enough, also goes by the title “A Little Something for your Birthday”) takes place over the course of a number of years, with all of the film’s action taking place on its lead character’s birthdays. When the film opens, Senna is a hippyish aspiring fashion designer who regularly sleeps with—and then discards—incredibly hot, much younger men. She’s against the concept of marriage and is resistant when her friend Darla (Liza Lapira) offers to set her up with an eligible bachelor friend.

The eligible bachelor is Adam, and his first encounter with Senna is classic romantic-comedy stuff: Adam approaches Senna at a bar and they begin to chat. Adam, not realizing that Darla invited him to the bar to meet the woman he’s currently speaking to, begins to denigrate his blind date (she’s a hippie, she has a new-agey name, he’s not really interested in her). Darla eventually shows up, and boy does Adam feel like a gosh-darn idiot when he realizes he’s been insulting Senna to her face.

Two birthdays later, and Adam is kissing Senna passionately on a parking lot in response to her calling him “the opposite of in-the-moment.” Over the course of the following three or four birthdays, Adam and Senna date, get engaged, break up, get engaged again, banter a lot, and participate in many more classic rom-com hijinks. It seems as though all of Senna’s major life events take place on her birthday.

There’s no sustained conflict in “All I Wish.” One moment Senna is being fired, the next her mother is straight-up giving her $10K to fund a fashion startup. One moment Adam has a girlfriend, the next moment he’s leaving her at the side of the road and declaring his love for Senna. This is a movie about very rich people having very hot sex and very good lives, generally. The stakes are very low, the central couple lacks requisite chemistry, and the birthday-structure does not allow for a coherent romance narrative.

Other things happen in this movie, like Senna’s mother (Burstyn) giving her a set of wedding china for her birthday or Senna’s boss (Famke Janssen) firing her for trying to sell a client a pair of neon-orange boots. Senna eventually becomes a designer in her own right, with the questionable encouragement of Darla (“you’re the Picasso of design.” Really, Darla?) But while the film wants its audience to celebrate Senna’s success in fashion, it never demonstrates that Senna has any actual skill. It’s a real “me or your lying eyes” situation; on the surface Senna’s fashion sense seems kind of bonkers (Janssen’s character describes it as “edgy, off-kilter stuff in weird colors”), but Darla says she’s the Picasso of design, so.

The dialogue in “All I Wish” feels as though someone spent a weekend watching nothing but 80s rom-coms and then distilled all those movies down into a series of cliche-ridden monologues: “let me tell you something about men. Men don’t fall in love with women who don’t take themselves seriously. They’ll have sex with them, but then they’ll have sex with just about anybody;” “as with most traditions, I agree that marriage is unnecessary. But isn’t it the unnecessary things in life that make the human experience so fascinating?” (That last one is a real highlight, as it comes from Darla’s hunky husband who doesn’t really say anything else of substance all movie long. Also, it’s nonsense gibberish. “The unnecessary things in life” are what make “the human experience so fascinating?” Alright.)

It’s undeniably fun to watch Stone having run in a lighter role. She’s been on a career-resurgence path of late, with a small but memorable role in James Franco’s “The Disaster Artist,” a striking lead performance in Steven Soderbergh’s excellent “Mosaic,” and, according to IMDB, is slated to star in an upcoming “Untitled Martin Scorsese/Sharon Stone Project.” There’s no reason her career resurgence shouldn’t include starring in a disposable birthday rom-com. She does manage to elevate the material to a certain extent, but the film is poorly-written and there’s only so much an actress can do about that.

The ensemble isn‘t bad, with Goldwyn playing a fairly generic leading-man type and Darla a classic romantic-comedy best friend. They both know their place, never stepping on Stone’s toes but fully inhabiting their respective trope-y characters. Burstyn is perhaps the most disposable of the bunch, the “Senna’s mom” thread amounts to especially little. Caitlin FitzGerald (so good on this season of Lifetime’s “Unreal”) shows up for a bit as one of Adam’s girlfriends, it’s a thankless role, she does what she can with it.

Everything wrong with “All I Wish” is exemplified in its soundtrack. The opening scene is underscored by jaunty music, the closing scene is underscored by jaunty music, and every scene in between is underscored by jaunty music. Sometimes the jaunty music takes the form of an instrumental “Happy Birthday,” in one particularly low moment for Senna, a sad version of “Happy Birthday” plays on the soundtrack. It. Is. Maddening. It’s as if no one involved with the editing of this film had ever seen a movie before and just assumed, for some reason, that every single scene in a romantic comedy must include an intensely annoying jazz score.

“All I Wish” is inoffensive, mostly painless, and only occasionally grating. It is also, however, derivative, confusing, and largely pointless. [C]