THE STORY – After a crushing breakup, Lucy moves back in with her eccentric single dad and dives into bad dates, false starts, and growing pains.
THE CAST – Ellie Sachs, David Cross, Hasan Minhaj & Thomas Mann
THE TEAM – Ellie Sachs (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 94 Minutes
There’s a scene early in “Lucy Schulman” where the titular character narrates her childhood obsession with two mallards at Central Park – a visit she and her dad paid every Sunday morning. She describes the two mallards as being inseparable and attached at the hip, but you quickly clue in that she’s not really talking about the ducks. And then one year, only one mallard came back. Without the other, the remaining duck looked sad and lost. “People who need people really are the luckiest people,” Lucy says, invoking Barbra Streisand; this narration by Ellie Sachs brings an infectious quality to Lucy, and the framing of the opening scenes clues you into the close bond that Lucy has with her father. A relationship you end up wishing was more central.
Writer-director-star Sachs makes her feature debut with a story that’s both small and warm, about a woman in her late twenties who’s stumbling through a bad breakup, moving back in with her dad, round after round of bad dates, an unfulfilling bookstore job, and the slow and unglamourous work of figuring out who you are when you’ve spent most of your life figuring out who you are to other people. Lucy has always taken the relationship with her boyfriends seriously. Maybe too much so. When her boyfriend Nikhil (Hasan Minhaj) breaks up with her after he is found sexting with another woman, she doesn’t get angry – she asks if there’s a way she could try to be better. She bends over backward, gives up things she loves, devotes herself fully in the name of selflessness, and he tells her she’s “too nice.” Lucy walks the streets of New York City with bloodshot eyes, telling herself, “Be brave, Lucy.” She’s never been dumped before. And it feels like shit.
“Lucy Schulman” is at its best when it stays close to Lucy and her dad, Peter, played brilliantly by David Cross. He was a single dad who raised her alone, and they have a bond perhaps closer than most fathers and daughters. Lucy grew up watching her dad’s own heartbreaks. Now, the dynamic reverses. In film, you don’t often see scenes of a father actively helping his daughter get over a breakup, and Cross makes it land with immense heart. When Lucy cries, Peter cries too, “like a yawn,” he explains. Their chemistry is the film’s real engine, and the rest of the film tries and fails to catch up to its speed.
This is especially true with the arrival of James (Thomas Mann). As rom-coms tend to do, this romance comes when Lucy’s not even looking. But unlike most meet-cute movies, the chemistry between the pair simply isn’t there, and this is where the film loses its footing. There are many films about romance blossoming, many great romantic comedies, but the chemistry has to be good; here, it feels forced. The long stretch devoted to them getting to know each other adds to character depth, but it’s also a little boring. What’s frustrating is that the more interesting material, like the complexity between the father-daughter relationship, gets pushed aside to make room for a relationship that never quite earns its screen time.
Sachs is fantastic at capturing the full emotional range of this time in Lucy’s life: the floating-on-air feeling of early romance, the neglected friendships, the forgetting of obligations, and, unfortunately, the heartache. In a montage of first dates, you feel every sigh and moment of discomfort on her face. The female experience is one bad date after another—the millennial experience of being stuck in dissatisfaction.
Lucy is a frustrating character, but deliberately so. We have either been Lucy or known a friend like Lucy, stuck in pursuit of something she can’t identify, desperate for connection, someone who exists in other people’s lives more naturally than she does in her own. Sachs understands this woman deeply, and that understanding saves the film even when the plot mechanics aren’t quite working.
The film doesn’t manufacture conflict or force big dramatic turns, which is refreshing on one hand, but it loses steam and even interest in some moments. By the end, Lucy finds herself happily single, and, to its detriment, the film ends just as her discovery of who she is begins. But even for all its shortcomings, “Lucy Shulman” is a first narrative feature in the best sense: honest, unpolished in places, and full of promise, made by someone with something real to say.
