Permission movie review & film summary (2018)

Will and Anna's experiment triggers all kinds of changes in Hale and Reece's relationship. In "Permission," the gay couple gets almost equal time in the narrative as the straight couple, the two stories running in tandem. It's another element that sets "Permission" apart from similar fare. The gay characters aren't there as sidekicks, or as people with nothing better to do than to sit around and give endless relationship advice to their straight friends. They've got their own stuff going on, and the two sets of relationships spark off each other in a chain reaction. Hale and Reece have been together for almost as long as Will and Anna, and Hale is now ready to think about being a parent. He sneaks peeks at adoption websites with the guilty air of a guy looking at porn while his wife is in the next room. On Hale's daily walks in the park with the dog, he meets Glenn (Jason Sudeikis), an exhausted new father, nodding off while holding his newborn. The two men talk about parenting, relationships, how babies change things. Reece is blindsided by Hale's new obsession. What once seemed stable is now in a state of flux.

At first glance, Dane and Lydia both seem like recognizable "types." Dane is the hot guy with tall hair, a musician who lives in a loft you wouldn't believe. Lydia is the up-for-it divorcee in the penthouse, coming down the stairs to greet Will in a slinky black dress. But both Dane and Lydia emerge as complex characters. That's the fun of it. Arnaud brings a soft openness to Dane which completely destabilizes the normal function such a character usually plays, and Gershon allows us to see underneath Lydia's sex-bomb mask (the difference is extreme), so much so you want a whole movie about her character. When she first kisses Will, she moans, "You smell like my father." Will and Anna, used to each other, struggle to understand the unfamiliar landscapes of other people's emotional and sexual makeups.

Rebecca Hall has been doing consistently excellent work for years, and here she manages to suggest—without any dialogue to support it—that something is not being addressed in Anna's life, something essential to her, but Anna couldn't even say what it was. She's not even present to it at the beginning. Dan Stevens does not condescend to his character: this is a nice person (sometimes actors have a hard time playing "nice"), who's perfectly fine with having slept with only one woman. The two create a believable sense of not just intimacy, but familiarity.