Watched on a Plane: What Happens Later

This is another in Cinema Romantico’s non-existent sporadic series of reviews of movies watched on planes.

Meg Ryan’s 2023 return to the rom com as both actor and director proves less triumphant than transitory. Set over the course of one night in an unnamed regional airport, it appropriately works best as an airplane movie, which is where I watched it, on a Dreamliner somewhere over the Pacific, and which is why I think I kept thinking the title was “What Happens Here” rather than “What Happens Later” – what happens at 35,000 feet stays at 35,000 feet. Uh, unless you write a review. Moving on. Based on a 2008 play by Steven Dietz, who wrote the script with Ryan and Kirk Lynn, “What Happens Later” is about an old college couple, Willa (Ryan) and Bill (David Duchovny), who run into each other in this anonymous airport when both their flights are delayed during a dreaded bomb cyclone. She is a free spirit, denoted by her rain stick, and he’s a square, denoted by his suit, a juxtaposition as old as “Barefoot in the Park” (1967) and though they have gone on to lead different lives, each one has remained on the other’s mind. It’s the ‘Before’ Trilogy mixed with Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno’s “Jet Lag” (2002) but with something of a mystical bent given an airport announcer who seems to be talking directly to them. (This disembodied voice is credited to a Hal Ligget, though the identity of the real person has remained deliberately unconfirmed, even if I would have sworn in the moment that it was Josh Lucas.)

“What Happens Later” is not all bad, at least, not at first, not when Willa and Bill are just, like, talking and/or arguing. It’s just nice to be in the presence of Rom Com Ryan and her patented exasperated charm after 8 years away from the movies and Duchovny infuses his role with a knowing middle-aged weariness, a guy who just wishes he could retire, already, but still has to go through life’s motions for who-knows-how-longer which, in the interest of full disclosure, was relatable. Indeed, there is a sequence in which Willa and Bill just whine about the curious attitudes and predilections of younger generations for a little while, and well, if in getting older, I have pledged to always remember what it was like to be young, I can also advise the young people that you, too, as Liz Lemon once observed, will get old someday. Right now, the movies are mostly for you, but they won’t always be, and so, let us have this. Where was I? Ryan and Duchovny. The performances work well in this breezier register, but less so when events turn more serious, not least because the attendant set-ups and payoffs, like Bill’s daughter’s dreams of being dancer, feel so rote.

The real problem, though, is that the eventual, ostensible magic realism is conveyed through nothing more than the announcer voice and a dwindling number of airport patrons. The universe might momentarily exist just for Willa and Bill, but that universe is forged of little more than fuzzy shots of snow, standard issue rom com montages, and discussions circling back to what was discussed before. It is hardly the stuff of metaphysics, rendering what should feel otherworldly as merely of this boring old world instead, and unintentionally underlining the struggle of old fogeys to believe life can still be magical. In fact, if “What Happens Later” worked in any way, it was to make me reconsider my dislike of the ending to 2013’s “Before Midnight,” the (possible) culmination of Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ Trilogy. The manner in which its central couple resorts to fantasy as it concludes always struck me as surrender without realizing it was surrender, but now, after so many more miles on the odometer, and one screening of “What Happens Later,” I wonder if I had it wrong and it was, in fact, a grim kind of hope all along.