The first day of an “introduction to screenwriting” course worth its salt makes one thing clear: your story won’t connect with an audience if your main characters don’t want anything. Yes, yes, rules are there to be broken and experimental art is vital to the spread of any form, but I don’t think so Get to know Sweet, a two-handed, low-budget rom-com that debuted on Peacock, had this as its goal. Instead, it’s just a failure.
Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson, two amazing performers who have done and will continue to do great things in their careers, are stuck in a first date loop in this annoying and confusing feature film from director Alex Lehmann. It’s a gimmick like Groundhog Day or PalmSprings, only this time it’s self-imposed, through time travel. Introduce primerbut when When Harry met Sally-inspired sitcom, and then trade insightful dialogue for the meandering tedium of an endless one-act play. (And not a good one, like David Ives Sure thingto which Get to know Sweet owes a substantial debt.)
The production, hampered by filming around COVID-19 protocols, tries to liven things up using locations in lower Manhattan, but it comes up with no more original ideas than “an Indian restaurant!” or “the ferry!” It is exhausting.
When we first meet Cuoco’s Sheila, she’s keen on Davidson’s Gary and eyeing him at the end of a bar. She approaches him, but before they part ways to take the yapping to a new location, she tells him that she is a time traveller. She makes cute/crazy faces, so Gary rolls with it for a while. But when she starts to finish his sentences, he’s confused.
It turns out that she really is a time traveller. See, there’s a nail salon with a solarium in the back that can send you back 24/7. Fair enough. While this date is the first we see in the audience, it’s actually the seventh. She keeps coming back the next morning because… well, that part is a bit unclear.
Sheila is also a killer, because every time she returns to the tanning bed, she finds herself from the new timeline, running over that version of herself with her car. This makes for a lot of laughs, but not for that person, while the other Kaley Cuoco tries to flee in terror.
The date lasts about a year and includes a chat with Deborah S. Craig as nail salon manager June, who seems pretty indifferent when this woman comes by every day. In fact, June knows about Sheila’s ongoing cycle of visits and her fruitlessness in helping Sheila find happiness, but that doesn’t make sense. If Sheila finds a new Gary every time, June should be just as clueless as he is. (Is Sheila sleeping too? Unclear.)
Eventually things start to go wrong as Sheila finds a way to go even further back in time to try to “fix” the disturbing incidents of Gary’s youth. His father was never around to play ball with him, so a mysterious uncle (Cuoco with a fake moustache) shows up wearing a glove. She also comes over to Gary’s clumsy teenage years as a Russian pizza delivery boy to strip him of his virginity. When the youngest Gary – whose simpler path in life has made him a bit of a tech dumbass – finds out about this time-warp tinkering, he becomes furious. At some point he screams that he can’t do this anymore. Do What more? This is all brand new to him if you follow the logic of this story!
Some listeners (raises hand) are clearly more attached to rules than others. Rian Johnsons grinder and his rejection of making any sense of time travel (“we’re going to be charting with straws here all day”) is great, but you need a certain amount of logic to make the hook work, and Get to know Sweet it just doesn’t have it.
This would be more forgivable if the scene work was excellent. Even though these actors are a game, the script is boring. Davidson is his typically reserved, charming self, as can be seen in the pretty good one The King of Staten Island and all the better Big time youth (currently streaming on Hulu if you missed it) and hanging out with him and Cuoco in full daffy mode borders on charm. But there aren’t any clever moments, just a parade of clichés you’ve seen in many other indie romances.
In 2019, Alex Lehmann released another two-hander, the far more successful one paddleton with Ray Romano and Mark Duplass. Again, it’s mostly just two people talking, but there’s a lack of depth and humanity. Get to know Sweet has all the unoriginality of a forgettable low-budget film — and eye-rolling dialogue, like getting Kaley Cuoco to say “all the things!” — plus a central premise that just doesn’t work. Don’t feel bad putting this one up.
#Kaley #Cuoco #Pete #Davidson #Meet #Cute #sense
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