FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Results’

“Results” is the kind of romantic comedy that doesn’t get made often enough, in that it doesn’t just focus on the differences between genders, it doesn’t devolve into some stupid “war of the sexes,” and it doesn’t revolve around some sort of fake tome or list of rules dictating how dating life should be or how relationships are supposed to work. This is just a story about some people and how romantic entanglements can be real and messy and can lead to some problems between otherwise well meaning people.

In this case, the well meaning people are Trevor (Guy Pearce), the upbeat trainer and gym owner who is totally business-minded at this point, one of his trainers named Kat (Cobie Smulders) and the rich client who shows up one day and kind of slowly changes their lives. That rich client is Danny (Kevin Corrigan) and the movie starts out actually centering on him, as the story starts with him being dumped by his wife, and then jump cuts to his arrival in Austin, Texas, where he rents a large house and wanders around it bored out of his mind.

One day, Danny sees a workout class at “Power 4 Life,” Trevor’s little gym in which he espouses and fully embodies the mantra of positive thinking and the whole “put it out in the universe and the universe brings it back to you” mentality, and he decides he needs to get in shape (which he does). After an awkward initial meeting, Kat is assigned to Danny and shows up at his McMansion for private sessions. They work out together and we learn a little about each character – we see how lonely and awkward Danny really and we found out about his recent divorce and the financial windfall he received shortly thereafter, giving him enough money to not know what to do with it, and how his aimlessness and desire to workout finally make sense in relation to this.

And then we find out how Kat is more emotionally vulnerable, as evidenced by her willingness to hook up with Danny one night after a little drinking and weed smoking, and this vulnerability can easily turn on a dime and lead to outbursts of real rage and anger, and it doesn’t take long for us to figure out this is because she’s a bit adrift at this point, finding herself with a dead end trainer job that she should be looking beyond by this point in her life and also finding a lack of connection and fulfillment from her very casual sexual relationship with her boss Trevor, a relationship that doesn’t even involve the sex anymore recently because he’s been so busy with everything else and she shows no interest in evolving that relationship anyway.

So the movie has this weird love triangle thing going on, though by no means is it a typical love triangle. It actually gets to a point where Danny tries to encourage Trevor to confess his true feelings for Kat, but then he turns around and gets upset by these feelings, seeing Trevor as a threat to his own chances with Kat but then at the same time getting mad at him for not fighting for Kat himself, so it is obvious that this whole situation has left Danny confused, especially since he starts contemplating going back to New York to try to work things out with his ex-wife. The story starts as Danny’s story and his flirtations with Kat, but then turns into a movie about Trevor and Kat’s relationship, or lack of one. And then making things more complicated for Trevor is how he tries to expand his business and then even gets into a relationship with another lovely lady, but when that doesn’t work out, it leaves Trevor feeling vulnerable and probably a little lonely himself, and all he has his his new business which he hopes to make bigger and bigger, which obviously stresses him out even more because of all the pressure.

What makes “Results” work as a movie is how it is unconventional for this kind of film. It avoids a lot of the tropes and conventions of the genre and feels content instead to explore these relationships in its own way and at its own pace. So nothing unfolds in a typical manner, even if some of the final outcomes of this story are ultimately predictable, because it takes a weird, off road way to get there. We know that the spazzy Danny would never really win over the very good looking Kat and that she would be more likely to end up with the equally good looking Trevor, but when Trevor admits to Kat that he has feelings for her and she responds by leaving because she’s afraid of those feelings and what they might mean in the long run, it throws everything for a loop. Usually it is the men in these movies that can’t admit their feelings and struggle with the idea of love, so it is nice for a change to see the very real situation in which these roles are reversed, the guy is the emotional one and the lady is the colder character who refuses to admit how she really feels. And also making this movie a little more unique is how Kevin Corrigan gets to be the third lead in this essentially and he gets to bring all the weirdness and awkwardness that he does so well to this role, which makes for a very atypical character, and one I feel like we wouldn’t see in big-budget studio romantic comedies.

The story does some meandering here and there and Danny even disappears for a pretty long stretch towards the end as the movie starts to focus more on Kat and Trevor, but that just feels like a byproduct of the indie film nature of this thing, as writer/director Andrew Bujalski obviously made the movie he wanted to make and didn’t have anyone around to tell him to make this thing more commercial and accessible. Instead he made his movie and told his story and it’s pretty good, definitely a nice change of pace for what usually passes for a movie involving both romance and comedy.

Click here for my coverage of the 2015 Florida Film Festival.