It is hard, really hard, for two people who really get each other to go separate ways. And if the film should in any way be criticized for taking a license in fictionalizing, it should be that they, the antagonists, do themselves apart too easily instead of too half-heartedly.
American films like this (among which I would also count this year's Drinking Buddies) are at last taking a realist turn. The dramatic tradition of the Global Theatre is finally waning at the start of the second decade of the 21st century, and I wholeheartedly compliment this effort of the Americans to finally own-up the oft-flaunted claim of film-making being an art of their own.
Before, it was just moving-image transcribed from words written as moral fables, or moving-image made larger than life though it so wants itself considered life, or moving-image that wants to be anything other than the mundane existence suffered by us day in and out. Now, it is moving-image unburdened by its artistic ambition, but finally made to carry a meaning of its own (instead of using the actors' facial or physical exaggeration or the capacity of the words which would be better employed on paper or the computers' computing power to give unearthly visual effects to awe the mortals), and put life as it is on the screen. By not affecting being art, it finally becomes art, on its own right.
And it is really good seeing other people baring their real life to you, doesn't it? Knowing that they face the same vexations as you do, knowing that they make the same fights as you make, knowing that they even have the (more or less) same sense of right or wrong as that so prepossesses you.
When we are brooding over the abstract virtues and morals that the sages and saints prescribed to us in their so higher than life books, one could only hope for a little catharsis like this to come along, to spare a little humanity to us that goes a long way.
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