Say what you will about a gimmick movie, but if the
gimmick is specific or clever enough, then no matter how good or bad the movie
is, it will have a long shelf life. I never heard a positive or negative thing
about Sliding Doors. It made a modest amount in the box office 20 years
ago. The closest it came to any awards buzz was being that other Gwyneth
Paltrow Miramax movie the year she was in Shakespeare in Love. It's a
middling 59 on Metacritic and 62 on RottenTomatoes. Pretty much the definition
of a forgettable movie.
So why did I watch it?
It has a good gimmick. Kind of the perfect gimmick,
actually. What makes it perfect is that it seems like something that's been
done a lot of times but it actually hasn't. I'm sure there were movies told in
dual timelines before. It seems to be more popular with TV, where I've seen it
done several times. Fraiser has an episode called "Sliding
Frasiers" that does this. The Malcolm in the Middle episode
"Bowling" won an Emmy for writing using the same structure. I
remember the head bandage in season one of 13 Reasons Why getting a Sliding
Doors shout out in reviews. For some reason, Sliding Doors made just
enough of an impression at the right time to be a cultural touchstone for a lot
of people. It's the shorthand for any story with alternate timelines. I can't
count the number of times I've read reviews or heard podcasts describe things
as "A Sliding Doors story".
So, that's one more "reference point movie"
to check off my list.
The movie itself - as everything I described earlier
would suggest - is fine. It's a sweet enough RomCom with a touch more drama
than I expected. Gwyneth Paltrow's accent is only distracting for the first few
minutes. She and John Hannah have nice chemistry. John Lynch is solid as the
cheating boyfriend who wants to believe he's the one being wronged by the
world. Jeanne Tripplehorn has a lot of fun playing "the other woman".
If this movie was just one of the two timelines, then it would be benignly
forgettable in the RomCom cannon.
The most entertaining aspect of the movie for me was
tracking how they differentiated the different timelines. Gwyneth starts with a
bandage on her head. As that heals, she then gets a haircut. John Hannah really
only shows up in one of the timelines. All the other characters have context
clues front and center of all their conversations. It's a clever albeit not
subtle bit of screenwriting. It's a shame that this movie has deterred other
movies from attempting the same narrative trick.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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