Results

There are two types of peo­ple in this world: those who keep fit and those who don’t. But whether you’re a gym bun­ny or a couch pota­to, the pow­er to shape your lifestyle is in your hands. That’s the ide­al­is­tic phi­los­o­phy preached by Guy Pearce’s per­son­al train­er guru, Trevor.

At his Austin-based health club, Pow­er 4 Life, Trevor teach­es ordi­nary — typ­i­cal­ly wealthy — folk to learn to love them­selves as they crunch, squat and wheeze their way to obtain­ing their per­fect body. Cru­cial­ly, his self-improve­ment cru­sade is about more than sim­ply address­ing cos­met­ic imper­fec­tions — the ​‘4’ sup­pos­ed­ly rep­re­sents the four pil­lars of well­ness: phys­i­cal, men­tal, emo­tion­al and spiritual.

But this strict régime of diet­ing, exer­cis­ing and giv­ing 110 per cent ²⁴⁄₇ isn’t for every­one. Indeed, Trevor’s most trust­ed and strong-willed employ­ee, Kat (Cobie Smul­ders), decides to change her career path when her latent malaise is crys­talised by a schmucky client named Dan­ny (Kevin Cor­ri­g­an), who adopts a some­what relaxed atti­tude towards the cus­tom pro­gramme which Kat has designed for him.

The trou­ble for Dan­ny is that both his body and mind are too lived in for him to be able to chin-up him­self out of the pit of depres­sion he’s been wal­low­ing in since his wife left him. For 29-year-old Kat, it’s not too late to make a change. It’s only after she acts on this sud­den impulse that Trevor realis­es that she’s not just anoth­er employ­ee to him.

Andrew Bujal­s­ki often builds his off­beat char­ac­ter por­traits around the search for uni­ver­sal truths relat­ed to the human con­di­tion. Results is no excep­tion. Though it ini­tial­ly plays out as a satire on fit­ness cul­ture, this is not a skin-deep social com­men­tary. Trevor and Kat are the kind of shiny hap­py peo­ple who we might regard as being ripe for deri­sion, while Dan­ny is the soft-flanked epit­o­me of a beta male in the throes of a mid-life cri­sis, but Bujal­s­ki shows a lot of affec­tion towards his char­ac­ters, even at their most impetu­ous and self-cen­tred. In a film about pur­su­ing per­son­al goals, it’s the com­mon flaws exhib­it­ed by these three seem­ing­ly incom­pat­i­ble indi­vid­u­als that res­onates most.

This is Bujalski’s most acces­si­ble film, a sim­ple yet real­is­ti­cal­ly messy rela­tion­ship dra­ma that boasts the same wry sense of humour as Com­put­er Chess and Beeswax but is tonal­ly at odds with the writer/director’s pre­vi­ous work. Results also sees Bujal­s­ki break his tra­di­tion of using pre­dom­i­nant­ly unknown and/​or non-pro­fes­sion­al actors. 

It’s a change of tack that pays off thanks large­ly to the sparkling chem­istry between Pearce and Smul­ders, whose will-they-won’t‑they dynam­ic will keep you hooked for long enough to ensure you won’t become dis­tract­ed with the thought of renew­ing that annu­al gym mem­ber­ship you’ve nev­er used. The pay off might be a touch more con­ven­tion­al than we’ve come to expect from Bujal­s­ki, but it’s hard to com­plain when the script is this good.