I Do...Until I Don't--A noxious British filmmaker (Dolly Wells) shows up in Vero Beach, Florida, to work on a documentary about marriage. The institution, she thinks, is in need of reform. Florida being the divorce capital of the world, or so she says, she starts following three married couples around with her camera, looking for (and trying to engineer) evidence to support her theory that marriage should be a seven-year contract with an option to renew.
Longtime married couples are represented by Harvey (Paul Reiser) and Cybill (Mary Steenburgen), affluent, perennially combative New York expats. Harvey walks around in a leather jacket and helmet even when he isn't riding his motorcycle; Cybill mocks him for it.
Younger specimens are Noah (Ed Helms) and his creatively frustrated wife Alice (Lake Bell). They run his late father's window blind business, which is on the verge of failure, and despite this looming financial disaster are rather halfheartedly trying to get pregnant. Also a target of the documentarian's camera and agenda are Alice's younger sister Fanny (Amber Heard) and her husband Xander (Wyatt Cenac), hippies in a theoretically open marriage.
This is the second feature written and directed by the talented Lake Bell. The actress has kept busy with prolific voice work and supporting parts, and pulled occasional nominal leading lady duty in stuff like No Escape and Million Dollar Arm. But it was with 2013's In a World..., a screwy, uneven but original comedy about envies and career barriers in the voice-over community, that she showed her behind-the-cameras promise. I Do...Until I Don't, though by no means without strong performances and laughs, suggests, alas, a sophomore slump for Bell.
Neither the critique nor the defense of marriage presented here is anything really new. This wouldn't much matter, if the specific storylines were surprising in some way, but the characterizations, as written, are sitcom-basic--the hippie couple and the comic-villainess filmmaker are particularly weak and stereotypical. And the interweaving of the various plot strands feels awkward and uncertain.
On the upside, there are many passages of bright, funny dialogue, and Bell gets good work out of her cast, down to minor players like Chauntae Pink and Rae Grey as massage parlor workers. Bell's own performance as the sweetly complaisant, melancholy Alice, is the strongest, but Reiser and Steenburgen also develop an impressive comic rapport out of their underwritten scenes that allows us to see the touching, almost reluctant bond beneath their distracted sniping at each other. There's real venom and acid in their bickering, but no real urgency; their marital resentments have a familiarity, a low-key domestic rhythm.
Performances like this allowed me to enjoy I Do...Until I Don't quite a lot, even as I recognized its significant weaknesses and limitations. Bell has ability and vision, and I hope she gets to continue to toll.
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