Her Emma also wears the anti-Brideshead Revisited uniform of the period: wire-rim glasses, clomping big boots, crap denim jackets. She has an anti-nuclear nightshirt and listens to Tracy Chapman records. What would she possibly see in a Winchester-educated yuppie like Dexter (Jim Sturgess)? A man who, after he becomes a well-known chat-show host, is described by one newspaper as “the most annoying man on telly”? It’s a question the film never really asks, yet alone answers.  Hathaway’s accent has been widely mocked. Make that accents: she shifts somewhat erratically between the soft-headed Northernisms you might hear in a Victoria Wood comic monologue and the posh Estuaryisms that Renée Zellweger popularised in Bridget Jones’s Diary. This isn’t a major flaw though, and it’s easy to be too harsh; many British people code-switch these days, and Emma, who spends much of her twenties working in a restaurant, would be used to “performing” before diners.  The bigger flaw is that neither she nor Dex is able to draw us into their fears, feelings, raptures. Or to suggest that they’re even capable of real emotions. Their hairstyles and outfits change, but they themselves evolve very little. Often, the settings are more charismatic than the leads. Cinematographer Benoît Delhomme captures the dingy artificiality of the Mexican restaurant in London at which Emma works, the dead-aired creepiness of the production studios at which Dexter preens as a buffoonish New Lad in the mould of Chris Evans and Terry Christian, the airy escape Emma finds in Paris.  It says something about the lack of spark between the two leads that the most compelling performer, far more so than Patricia Clarkson, miscast as Dexter’s cancer-stricken mother, is Rafe Spall as Ian, a struggling comedian with whom Emma shacks up. A cross between one of the jumbled losers in a Mike Leigh film and the seemingly insipid but actually quite sharp and kindly Steve, Miranda’s husband in Sex and the City, he offers an endless stream of dire gags, ticky gestures and endearing outburst. His confession to Emma – “I think you’re the absolute bollocks” – is the sweetest thing anyone says in the movie.  Lone Scherfig, in Italian For Beginners (2000), which she made according to the austere rules of the Danish Dogme 95 movement, and even in her very engaging treatment of Lynn Barber’s memoir An Education (2009), is a director who’s happy to stay away from darkness. The cankering sense of failure and the vertiginous grief that Nicholls relayed so movingly in the novel are absent here, snuffed out perhaps by the film’s episodic structure.  What’s left is a pleasant, occasionally amusing, tragically tasteful romantic drama. That’s not an insignificant achievement, but it does create an odd situation in which One Day, the book, is more cinematic than One Day, the movie.  One Day: Seven Magazine review, by Jenny McCartney  Seven rating: * * *  It’s a brave director who takes on a film adaptation of a well-loved romantic novel, in particular a publishing phenomenon such as One Day, David Nicholls’ tale of long-delayed love and loss. Viewers who have read the book are wont to have imagined their own preferred versions of the characters, and are ready to pounce angrily on any perceived inauthenticity.  In this case, the director Lone Scherfig – who made such a good job of the nuances of Sixties Britain in An Education – might have hoped for some indemnity against criticism by having Nicholls himself as a screenwriter. If so, she had reckoned without the controversy caused by casting Anne Hathaway, the American actress, in the role of Emma Morley, the down-to-earth Yorkshire girl who carries a torch from her university days for posh, troubled Dexter (Jim Sturgess) even as he moves unsteadily through life with all the direction of a car with a broken Sat Nav.  Although Hathaway veils her striking prettiness rather well in the earlier scenes, thanks to the Eighties sartorial penance of shapeless clothes, big glasses and Doc Martens, the accent remains a drawback. It veers unpredictably between received pronunciation and ee bah gum, occasionally coming on Yorkshire so strongly that in one scene I thought her character was doing it for a joke.  The problem with this, aside from having a disorienting effect upon the audience, is that it thereby fails to nail the novel’s subtle distinctions of class. Dexter is born with the natural sense of entitlement of the upper-middle class, and has a corresponding tendency to be careless with what he’s got; Emma must, according to Yorkshire cliché, pull herself up by her bootstraps. He’s got the charm, and she’s got the character, until they find themselves nearly 20 years on, still craving what the other has.  The snapshots of their relationship through the years, of unspoken yearnings and botched signals, are deftly handled, although the shifting eras could have been tackled with greater zest. Yet if Hathaway’s diction sometimes fails her, the look in those liquid brown eyes can still speak volumes.  Jim Sturgess, as Dexter, performs the considerable feat of making his character more likeable than in the book. Sturgess has an instinctive quickness as an actor, and here manages to convey both the crassness of Dexter – whose cockiness becomes a coked-up patina of self-loathing as his telly presenting career crashes and burns – and his complicit appeal.  There is certainly enough, in Scherfig’s One Day, to touch susceptible heartstrings, but the tug is not as forceful as it could have been.
The big-screen version of a much-loved bestseller, One Day, starring Anne   Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, lacks the spark of the novel