To say that Michael McGowan’s One Week suffered from the wrong movie/wrong time syndrome would be an understatement. Much like the beautiful movie Walk The Line, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance and the film were overshadowed by Jamie Foxx’s Ray, which came out a year earlier. From most critics’ perspectives, Ray was a slightly better movie. While Phoenix received a Best Actor Academy Award nomination, there was no chance he would win it because Foxx won the award a year before. The Academy wasn’t going to reward essentially the same movie with a nearly identical lead performance. The unfortunate part was that these movies were based on legendary actors (Johnny Cash in Walk The Line, Ray Charles in Ray), and each actor portrayed each man correctly.

ne Week evoked similar emotions that Walk the Line did. Like the Walk The Line/Ray comparison, the comparison of One Week was also to a movie that came out one year prior. That movie was Into the Wild. The difference between the Ray/Walk The Line comparison was that both movies were based upon true stories, and I believe that Walk The Line was finished filming before Ray was released. Both were big-budget releases. While watching One Week, it was trying to capitalize on Into the Wild’s success. There were more than a couple of problems with this, though. The most important of these was that Into The Wild was adapted from a best-selling book. One Week was not. McGowan (Saint Ralph) had every tool he wanted at his disposal to try and make this as dramatic and heart-wrenching as he wished. The same regulations did not confine him in Into The Wild because his movie was fiction. Had One Week been completed before Into the Wild, it might have had more of an audience. Instead, it was relegated straight to DVD.

With all that said, One Week wasn’t a bad movie. I’ll state one more time, and then I won’t mention it again, that McGown could have made his lead character as vibrant or as vanilla as he wanted to. He didn’t have to do the same research that director Sean Penn had to do for Into The Wild. I’ve made my peace with that comparison. It’s time to focus more on the movie at hand.

Joshua Jackson (known more for his roles in two widely known series – Dawson’s Creek and Fringe) stars as Ben Tyler, a twenty-something English teacher, and aspiring writer, diagnosed in the film’s first scene as having terminal cancer. He’s told from the start that his days are limited, and if he wants to extend his life as long as possible, he needs to begin treatment immediately. Campbell Scott (Dying Young) is the film’s narrator throughout this movie (much like Christopher McDanless’s sister Carine did during Into the Wild. As the narrator, Scott says things to the audience that Ben is thinking. He tells us alternatives to the decisions that Ben will have to make during the movie. I liked that this film had a narrator, but that is yet another comparison to Into The Wild.

Ben is engaged to Samantha Pierce (Liane Balaban – Last Chance Harvey, Definitely, Maybe). She is committed to him and wants him to enter chemo as soon as possible. She’s willing to stand by her man and be with him through his battle though she knows it’s only a matter of time and that he will not recover from it. Ben has different ideas, though. He wants to get away for a few days to clear his head. So he buys an old motorcycle and heads west across Canada. His couple of day trip turns into something more prolonged than that as Ben discovers life. He engages in other cultures, meets unique people who influence his outlook on his situation and experiences a part of his beautiful country that he might never have seen otherwise.

Part of the problem with One Week is that Ben will die. He, his family, and his friends all know it. We also know. Yet we never really believe that it’s going to happen. Part of that goes back to the movie not being based on a true story. The film never tricks us into believing we are watching anything other than a movie. Part of this might also have to do with Jackson’s character. He reacts in a way that most of us would not. Is he sad that he’s dying? Do we see any of the stages of depression a person would go through when told their life will end in a few short months? There are severe problems with the screenplay.

The movie would have been far more successful if Ben had followed the same adventure, but it was because he was lost in life or needed to get away from his life rather than because he was dying. Ben shares with us through narration that he has fears that all of us have. Ben shares with us his need to feel purposeful in life. He shares with us all that he has missed the wishes that weren’t realized. Even as the movie nears its conclusion, it feels like we are reaching the end of an episode of some television drama. There is also Samantha, who figures into the story too. In a way, we come to empathize with her more than we sympathize with him. I believe this movie would have been more successful without her. McGowan was a bit over-ambitious with this movie, which caught up with him in the end.

Plot 7.5/10
Character Development 6/10
Character Chemistry7.5/10
Acting 7/10
Screenplay 5.5/10
Directing 5.5/10
Cinematography 8.5/10 (lovely visuals)
Sound 8.5/10 (very nice music)
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 7.5/10
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