THE STORY – As married couple Dom and Cole set off to Italy in an effort to reconnect after 10 years of marriage and before bringing home their adopted child, they encounter a series of hysterical and increasingly intense cultural barriers that threaten to upset their best-laid plans.
THE CAST – Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells, Morgan Spector, Amanda Seyfried & Nunzia Schiano
THE TEAM – Brian Crano & David Craig (Directors/Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 96 Minutes
Cole (Andrew Rannells) and Dom (Nick Kroll) need this vacation. Having stressed for months about their application to adopt a child from a surrogate (Amanda Seyfried), they’ve finally submitted their final video statement. Now, to keep their mind on anything else and also celebrate their anniversary, they’re going to spend some time in Italy. First, they meet Dom’s father’s best friend in Rome and then head out to the country, where Dom has booked a special anniversary dinner at an exclusive vegetarian restaurant. When Daniele (Paolo Romano) tells them he booked a table for them at an even more exclusive farm-to-table restaurant as an anniversary present, they deviate from their itinerary and go there instead. On their way, they get lost and end up stuck in a pothole on a dirt road that turns out to be a private driveway. Thus begins the longest night of Cole and Dom’s lives as the bumbling Americans and their DuoLingo-based knowledge of Italian have to navigate their way through an increasingly violent series of mishaps and misunderstandings.
It’s clear from the beginning that writer-directors David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano may have based “I Don’t Understand You” on their own experiences traveling abroad and trying to adopt a child. The dynamic between Cole and Dom feels instantly familiar, from the shorthand they have when speaking to each other to the slight annoyances and petty grievances that poke through when they start to get even slightly stressed. Kroll and Rannells have great chemistry, to be sure, but the characters are so well-defined on the page that they don’t have to add much. Much of the film’s first act focuses on character, letting the audience get acquainted with Cole and Dom as they live their life together. This is necessary to get the audience invested in them and their plight to become parents so that when things go haywire later, we still root for them even after they commit some regrettably heinous acts.
Having performers with the charm of Rannells and Kroll helps with this, as well. When things first start going wrong, they get into the kind of fight most couples would under the circumstances, and both performers are endearing enough that you just want them to work through it. Once they do, and Dom and Cole become more complicit in what happens as things go from bad to worse, the confusion and fear that consume them is palpable. The two actors bring the best out of each other, with Kroll’s too-cool-for-school attitude and Rannells’s overeager, boyish charm evening each other out as they meet in the middle. Both performers share a penchant for sarcasm that makes for some hilarious line readings. Still, they each maintain their specific voice, keeping Dom and Cole as distinct from each other as they can, given that the script provides shockingly little backstory for the main characters. In fact, the characters feel more specific in performance than they do on the page, with the performers’ personalities doing the most work of making the characters feel like distinct human beings.
Thankfully, the screenplay is funny enough that the relatively indistinct leads pose much less of a problem than they would have without performers on the level of Kroll and Rannells. Due to the nature of the story, the joke structure gets repetitive, with language barrier miscommunications and stunned reactions to surprising violence making up the overwhelming majority of the film’s jokes. Despite that repetitive quality, the film does a great job with escalation, constantly upping the ante and raising the stakes. This not only masks the repetitive nature of the jokes but also gives the film strong forward momentum, leading to a hilarious, fast-paced climax that gives way to a genuinely sweet denouement as Cole and Dom come to learn the true meaning of being a parent.
Everything comes nicely full circle at the end, even with one incredibly obvious plot hole that Craig and Crano try to hand-wave away with a funny, if unconvincing, mid-credits scene. That the film does such a strong job balancing that ending sweetness with the macabre humor that makes up the bulk of its runtime speaks well to Craig and Crano’s skill behind the camera, even if some of the finer details may have gotten away from them. The film’s issues are all small, though, and if you love to laugh while cringing, “I Don’t Understand You” will give you all you can eat.