"Look Both Ways" - Film Review
Look Both Ways is desperate to be Sliding Doors for Gen Xers. Filled with heavy-handed cliches and weak, well-worn tropes, there’s not much here to love. The film begins with Nat (Lili Reinhart) and Gabe (Danny Ramirez) as they are about to graduate from the University of Texas at Austin. Gabe is a drummer in a band that’s about to go on tour, and Nat is ready to move to Los Angeles with her friend Cara (Aisha Dee) as soon as school ends. All those plans change when Nat and Gabe sleep together. Nat thinks she might be pregnant, and the movie splits itself into two different realities. In one, Nat isn’t pregnant and moves to LA to chase after her dream of being an animator. In the other, Nat is pregnant and moves back in with her parents.
Part of the trouble with Look Both Ways is that the split into the two realities happens fairly early. This forces everything the audience knows about Nat’s super-generic five-year plan to be told in a painfully stilted conversation between herself and Gabe in the opening scene. It’s not Reinhart’s fault that her character comes across as one-dimensional. She tries her damndest to inject charm into Nat, but the audience doesn’t have a true grasp of Nat’s motivations and interests. The two Nats in their different timelines don’t even feel like they’re the same character. Perhaps it’s because there isn’t enough of an introduction to see how these two split timelines affect her personality.
Cr. Felicia Graham/Netflix © 2022
Look Both Ways doesn’t do its due diligence in showing the realities of being a twenty-two-year-old mother. The film spends far more time in the Los Angeles reality than in the pregnancy one, and that’s understandable to an extent. It’s easy to get swept up in watching Nat rise through the ranks of an animation studio and lead the life she’s always dreamed of. Yet the look at motherhood is equally glamorized. Nat goes from finding out she’s pregnant to giving birth in under ten minutes. When the baby wakes Nat and Gabe in the middle of the middle of the night, it’s all fun and games. There’s no sleep-deprived struggle or meaningful look at the financial, physical, and emotional impacts of having a child. The film is in love with the idea of showing this forked pathway, but doesn’t want to give a realistic look at either timeline.
While the premise is disappointing, the performances of Dee and Reinholt are anything but. It’s a shame they’re trapped in this speedrun of a movie. Look Both Ways tries to cover five years in two separate timelines in less than two hours, but isn’t interested in the minutiae that really make up life. Instead, it’s broad strokes that barely amount to anything of substance.
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