The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (Canosa, 2022)
As The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry drew to a close, I found myself pleased with it. While the film was familiar with its eccentric characters and self-conscious literary references, those characters were nevertheless appealing and the film’s execution competent. Yes, I thought, this was a marginal thumbs-up.
Then I looked at the time stamp and realized the film was at the fifty-minute mark and only half over.
It’s not that the second half is markedly worse than the first half, but somewhere during it the film seems to lose track of what it is really about. While the first half does have a cast of supporting characters, the eponymous Fikry (Kunal Nayyar) gives the plot an anchor. He is the sort of lovable misanthrope who owns a bookstore but hates just about any popular book you can name. Amelia (Lucy Hale), a sales rep appears tailored made to flame the burning embers of Fikry’s cold and lonely soul. In a somewhat on-the-nose reference to Silas Marner, Fikry adopts an abandoned baby who gives him a reason to get up in the morning. All of this is familiar, but it is sweet and pleasant.
One problem with the second half is that the storylines of the secondary begin to take center stage. As is sometimes the case with films based on novels, the individual scenes are polished but they upset the more delicate flow and balance of a more compressed film plot. Add to this a flashback structure that is meant (I think) to provide a surprise twist but instead induces shrugs, and one can feel the emotional energy flowing out of the film faster than water fills a leaky boat.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is a hard film to actually dislike in part because Nayyar and Hale are so darned appealing. It’s a pleasure to see Christina Hendricks in a non-Mad Man role and to see Scott Foley away from his television work. David Arquette provides solid support work too. If this were a television season and the supporting characters’ scenes were part of stand-alone episodes, the material might work better. As it stands, most of these scenes only work because I care about the actors, not the characters.
