Nailed: The Film That Almost Wasn’t. But Then Was.

David O. Russell has gone from strength to strength in recent years. Buoyed by the success of The Weinstein Hail Mary – sorry – I mean Silver Linings Playbook, he went on to make the even more popular American Hustle. His most recent release however, has seemingly nothing to do with him, say hello to Accidental Love.

At a glance, it appears to be a funny, tongue-in-cheek (or indeed nail-in-brain) piece starring Jessica Biel as the victim of bizarre happenstance and no medical insurance to combat it, as well as Jake Gyllenhaal as a hunky lawyer and James Marsden notching yet another role as a guy in the wrong corner of a love triangle, after the X-Men series and Superman Returns. What the trailer doesn’t clarify that the film had a decidedly difficult birth, and that David O. Russell was the original director. Originally called Nailed, the film was written by Kirsten Gore, daughter of Al Gore, who is surely celebrating his daughter’s success as we speak. It was meant as a scathing indictment of the US healthcare system with some quirky comedy thrown in for good measure, but the final product seems to be balanced in the opposite direction.

It was first shot in 2008, but succumbed to financial issues and got shut down so many times that Russell fucked off and went to make something more worth his while. That something turned out to be The Fighter, so yay for that. Meanwhile, the studio stapled vend-a-director Stephen Greene to the outing and re-shot all the unfinished footage. Despite this, the film continued to languish in development hell, undergoing numerous rocky test screenings and being retitled twice before ultimately becoming Accidental Love (it was called Politics in Love before that).

The release is fairly well timed, considering Jake Gyllenhaal’s recent resurgence off the back of Nightcrawler and Enemy, and being that it’s out in February, the month of Academy Award peacocking, very few films of similar style will be around to contend with it. However the film turns out, it will remain best known alongside things like The Box, Red Tails and about 20 Bond films as another escapee from development hell, although it was pretty badly maimed coming out of the gate.

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