“Just when you get to be the age to say something, nobody wants to hear it,” William Davis (David Duchovny) says to a captive audience in “What Happens Later,” when he finds himself stuck in an airport with Wilhelmina Davis (Meg Ryan), who just happens to share a last name with him rather than being related in any other way, though there was a time 25 years ago that was a possibility. The two were once in love as students at the University of Wisconsin, though might’ve been too young to properly convey that to one another and thanks to a snowstorm, there is plenty of time to catch up as he is held up from departing to Austin for his job in finance and she can’t make it to Boston to see a friend, said to be doing some off-the-clock work in her capacity as a shaman, preparing for a cleansing ceremony with a rain stick in tow.
When William tell Wilihemina that “You look more the same than you used to, if that makes any sense,” it may not to her, only half-conscious of her hippie-dippie ways, but it surely does to an audience as Ryan returns to the genre with which she was always most strongly associated, no longer the ingenue waiting to be swept off her feet but a wizened woman of the world, taking on a greater role in appearing not only in front of the camera as one-half of the two-hander, but behind it as well. It’s Ryan’s second directorial effort after first taking on an adaptation of William Saroyan’s “The Human Comedy” for her 2015 drama “Ithaca,” and somehow “What Happens Later” is at once more ambitious and far more contained, not doing much to hide the stage origins of Steven Dietz’s play “Shooting Star” when only the actress/director and Duchovny have speaking parts, unless you count the unseen public address announcer, and even for a small regional airport, the place seems empty.
However, Ryan and Duchovny have more than charisma to fill the screen, a fact that Ryan the director is entirely conscious of as she subverts the expectations of what one would expect of Will and Wilehmina’s meet-cute reunion as the artifice of its set-up starts to fall away and the two can get real with one another about where they are in their lives. Although Wilhelmina may lament in the early going how the two were never ones to make small talk, instead indulging in “large talk and truthful discourse,” it becomes apparent that actual honesty may have been difficult to come by then and looks potentially elusive now when both dance around why it seems like they’re a little too comfortable being prevented from taking off to their planned destinations.
As an actress, Ryan reminds that few have ever been as gifted at making overlapping dialogue feel authentic — and Duchovny is a natural, though he’s long resisted such roles as a romantic lead, making this something of a treat — but as a director, she takes that signature of the genre among others away from cliche towards something more thoughtful when so many make falling in love look easy while neglecting what the long haul requires. “What Happens Later” runs the risk of feeling too unctuous at first when taking every opportunity to announce itself as a romcom or a bait-and-switch when the reality of how far apart the two Davises are from the people they once were sets in, but the same hard-won wisdom that eventually brings its characters together for a deeper connection is invested into how it unfolds, extending the feeling of the one that’s got away to anyone who might not want to take the time to listen.
“What Happens Later” opens wide on November 3rd.
