Guy Pearce and Cobie Smulders, personal trainers in an Austin gym, and their new New York schlub client, Kevin Corrigan, embark on colliding paths to self-improvement in Andrew Bujalski’s wry rom com.
Results manages, in its own subtle, unassuming way, to reinvent the rom com. It’s enchanting.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2015
Results 2015
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Andrew Bujalski’s amiably off-kilter rom com circles around three characters and a Texas gym called Power 4 Life. The Australian owner and founder, Trevor (Guy Pearce), is sincere about the self-motivation mantras that are his stock in trade. That 4 stands 4 the four Wellnesses: Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual, and Trevor plans to dedicate real estate to each of them. His most hardcore trainer Kat (Cobie Smulders) concentrates solely on the Physical: there’s nothing wrong with Kat that a vigorous run can’t put right.
Their regimes are upended by the arrival of a transplant from New York in dire need of a tone up in every department. Danny (the deeply funny Kevin Corrigan) looks as though he’s never before set foot outdoors. He is unemployed, recently divorced and, thanks to an inheritance, newly very rich. Trevor is in no position to turn down the cheques Danny hands over for Kat’s house calls. But if Danny can be energised at all, it’s by an interest in Kat that doesn’t extend to her fitness programme. Any self-improvement that takes place may be purely accidental, but it’s excellent fun to watch so much self-denial unravel.
“The most adorable aspect of Andrew Bujalski’s deadpan-goofy quasi-romance Results is the way two of the three main characters have the hardest bodies imaginable but soft hearts and wooly heads… And Pearce makes Trevor so dopey and lovable that his wiry physique makes him seem like a walking non sequitur.” — David Edelstein, New York