There's an old saying in comedy: "Buy
the premise, buy the bit." Alex Holdridge's In Search Of A Midnight Kiss asks the audience to buy a whole
stack of premises, starting with the idea that a kiss on New Year's Eve is "all
the hope of romance of the year culminating in just one moment." In a
last-ditch attempt to get the year started right, mopey screenwriter Scoot
McNairy posts a request for a date on Craigslist, and gets a call from sardonic
actress Sara Simmonds, who tells him he has until sundown to impress her, or
else she's going to find someone else to smooch. Contrived? Absolutely. But
Holdridge must feel he needs the contrivance to juice up a routine indie
walk-and-talk.
In Search Of A Midnight Kiss shows enough flashes of brightness
that its more conventional business is all the more dispiriting. When McNairy
is caught masturbating to a Photoshopped picture of his roommate's girlfriend,
or when he jokes that he would've slit his wrists long ago "if the bathtub here
weren't so filthy," or when he grills Simmonds about whether she trimmed her
pubic hair in anticipation for their date, Midnight Kiss becomes just another artificial
movie about quippy characters trying to out-zing or out-shock each other. But
then McNairy's roommate launches into a long, funny rant about how physically
dirty and low-down Los Angeles women are, or McNairy objects to wearing clothes
on his date that will make him feel humiliated in 10 years, and suddenly the
characters come to life, graced with nuance and a point of view.
It also helps that Midnight Kiss sports such an evocative
black-and-white DV look, using dissolves to add a romantic touch to the
decrepit downtown L.A. downtown blocks and seedy waterfront parks where
Holdridge sets the action. The movie has such a strong look and such a keen sense of place that
it's hard not to root for it, even when Holdridge is having McNairy run from
Simmonds' deranged ex-boyfriend in a scene that could've been ripped from some
unproduced '80s teen comedy. Los Angeles is often accused of not having much
substance, but even when Midnight Kiss is sputtering, viewers can tune the dialogue out and
just watch the scenery in one of the most "there"-y L.A. movies ever made.