Rashida Jones filtered her own relationship history — and a few heart-wrenching break-ups — into this weekend’s Celeste and Jesse Forever, an L.A.-set look at one couple’s struggle to remain besties through separation, divorce, and the complicated disentanglement that follows the world’s best-worst break-up.
Co-written with fellow actor Will McCormack, whom Jones dated for three weeks years ago, the sweet, affecting dramedy is peppered with moments inspired by real life events that carry Celeste through her journey of painful but necessary self-discovery — including one legendarily awful date with a guy who turned out to be, in Jones’ words, “a serial masturbator.”
Like Celeste, Jones, who looks back on her past relationships as life lessons, has learned the hard way that not all love stories are meant to last. “I’m no better at break-ups,” she admits. “I haven’t gotten any stronger, I just try to learn my lesson in a way where I don’t have to re-learn it, and that’s the only thing I can do,” she says.
As I was watching, I realized these are revelations you can only really have by experiencing them firsthand.
Yeah, totally. Will always says, “The cure for the pain is the pain.” I hate when he says that, but I definitely feel like it’s the first step in real adulthood, when you’re like, “Oh, things are not going to be the way I thought they would.” In some ways they’re going to be better, and in some ways they’re going to be way worse. But regardless, I have no control over it, and my need to control it only makes it worse. It definitely came from a real place. It’s a very personal story for me, and hopefully it’s the kind of thing I can leave in the movie and…
Films like Celeste and Jesse Forever and The Five-Year Engagement feel like the start of some new subgenre — these unromantic semi-comedies about the microdramas of nice, emotionally inarticulate people struggling their way through relationships. Both feature comedic actors working with material that’s not intended to be all that funny, and both take angles on relationships that don’t usually make it to screen — a prolonged breakup leading up to a divorce and a prolonged, unhappy stretch leading up to a wedding. And both cruise on the charms of their lead actors, in this case Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg, holding together just enough to be satisfying while also leaving you wishing they had a little more to them.
Jones doesn’t just star in Celeste and Jesse Forever, she co-wrote the screenplay with Will McCormack (who also appears onscreen) — The Vicious Kind’s Lee Toland Krieger directs. It’s an interesting role for an actress to sculpt for herself, and the fact that Jones worked to make it happen speaks to the dearth of complicated, flawed female characters that are out there. Celeste, the character Jones plays, has definite hangups, realistic ones that the film explores with almost too much enthusiasm — she can be hard to spend time with as she strikes out at her friends and herself in the process of actually getting in touch with her emotions. Despite the title, the film’s far more hers than Jesse’s (Samberg) — this isn’t so much a rom-com or even a break-up movie as it is a portrait of a woman getting her unearned certainly about life shaken up a bit, and coming to terms with her own imperfections.
Celeste and Jesse have been best friends since high school, and when the film starts we see them together in a car,…
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