Add Plus One to Your List

Plus One is a 2019 romantic comedy starring Jack Quaid and Maya Erskine and it recently started streaming on Netflix. The movie follows Ben and Alice, two friends from college burdened with a summer full of weddings. To make matters worse, Alice has recently been dumped and Ben is chronically single. Dreading a summer full of dateless weddings, they agree to take each other as their plus one to all the weddings they attend that year. 

All of Ben’s male friends are getting married, so Alice agrees to be Ben’s wingman at the weddings. For the first several weddings of the film, Alice pushes Ben into women or trips and falls on them herself in order to introduce her date to other single women at the weddings.  

Through this deal, Ben and Alice begin spending a lot more time together. They find themselves having serious conversations about their personal lives and opening up about things they don’t feel comfortable talking about with other people. Ben opens up to Alice about the relationship he has with his dad. His dad is about to get married for the third time and wants Ben to be his best man. Ben is hesitant to agree to the position because he doesn’t believe his father should be getting married again. He believes that if his dad couldn’t do it right the first time, then it’s senseless to continue getting married. He goes as far to tell his dad that he doesn’t think he’s “meant to be married”. 

Ben would like to be married, and he only wants to do it the one time to avoid being like his dad. It is this immense pressure that keeps Ben from finding women or keeping relationships. It seems no one quite measures up to Ben’s high expectations.

 Halfway through the summer Ben and Alice decide to start dating. Things are great at first for the two of them, but eventually their differences make the relationship seem less than perfect in Ben’s eyes. 

This movie takes the viewer on a rollercoaster through these two character’s relationship. Both characters are incredibly likable, and I found myself rooting for their relationship very early on. I was surprised by how quickly the movie moved into the pairing of the two characters. I, personally, expected it to take a little longer than it did. I wasn’t sure where the movie would go beyond them falling in love, but it surprised me with a whole narrative I didn’t expect. 

The message of the film is clear, it knows exactly what it’s trying to say to its audience and it does it well. As far as romantic comedies go, it is one of the better ones that’s been released in the last five years. The characters don’t feel cliche, rather they feel like people the viewer may know from college. 

I chose to watch this movie mostly to see Jack Quaid. After watching all released seasons of The Boys and seeing him in the revival of Scream in 2022, I was excited to see him take on a different kind of role. Ben felt like a very individual character among the many Jack Quaid has played, but still felt realistic based on Jack Quaid’s own look and personality. He was a believable and likable main character as far as rom coms go. I was equally impressed by Maya Erskine’s performance; I hadn’t seen her in any of her other projects and I really enjoyed her presence on the screen.

There was only really one thing I found a bit off-putting about the film. To introduce each wedding Ben and Alice were attending, the wedding would begin with either the best man or maid-of-honor speech, depending on whose friend was getting married. This made sense in the context of the story because the movie starts and ends with Ben giving a best man speech and Alice spends a good portion of the movie talking about being her little sister’s maid-of-honor. However, after the speech was performed, the next scene would be before the wedding begins. Once I figured this out, I knew not to expect the reception after every speech. This was just one thing I found confusing about the movie, but it didn’t take away from the overall quality of the film. I thought to include it in this review in case someone would like to watch the film and also found it slightly confusing. 

Overall, the movie was really good. I don’t know if Jacob would like this movie, but I think he would find it to be an enjoyable movie nonetheless. I do think the only way he’d ever watch it is if I made him sit through it, and I think he would call Ben “Hughie” the whole movie.