Back in the present, the wife wakes up from her coma without
her memories of the last five years. She looks uncomprehendingly at her anxious
husband. She thinks he’s her doctor. She looks down at her ring finger and is
shocked. Who is this man? The structure of these opening scenes flips the
script. We already know the two of them are in love, are married. The central
question is whether or not she’ll remember those feelings. The husband’s
determined to re-woo his wife, but she just wants to figure out what to do in
this life she doesn’t remember creating for herself.
Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams play the husband and wife
and they relate to each other pre- and post-accident in convincing ways.
They’re a believable couple, intimate and comfortable. Later, he can’t help but
take her memory loss a little personally. McAdams plays it subtly differently
after the accident, posture a little straighter, voice a little looser. She
feels like a woman who has fallen back in time while everyone else moved
forward. She sees the pain on her husband’s face but she can’t recognize him as
her husband.
What she does see, what’s comfortable to her, is her parents
(Sam Neill and Jessica Lange), her neighborhood, her old friends, her old life,
even her old boyfriend (Scott Speedman). We learn that she was in law school and
decided she wanted to change course. She had a falling out with her parents and
moved into the city where she studied to become an artist. She hasn’t seen her
parents in years. Her husband never met them. Now, they’re all she knows. She
woke up a law student again, surprised not only by her marriage but by her
career as well.
Director Michael Sucsy presents all of this with a kind of
glossy Hallmark-card heartbreak that works pretty well. There’s a surprisingly
effective core of convincing emotion here. McAdams delivers strong work and I
must admit that Tatum’s limited range is starting to charm me from time to time.
In fact, if the film had honed in on its lead performances and really felt them
instead of just presenting them, it would really have been something. As it is,
I wish someone could have gotten his or her hands on the script by Abby Kohn
(of Valentine’s Day) and Jason Katims
(of Friday Night Lights) and just
tightened it up, sharpened the focus, and cleaned away all the clutter.
The supporting cast members aren’t allowed to pop out in any
notable way and there are easily a half-dozen characters standing around. Neill and Lange do good work with thin roles as the stuffy, rich parents who swoop in
and try to use the amnesia to help mend their relationship with their
not-exactly-starving-artist daughter. (She forgot whatever it was that came
between them, so why not? Right?) But the central husband and wife each have a
gaggle of friends and colleagues that float around as convenient scene partners
to bounce emotions and plot points off of without ever coming into clear focus
as actual characters. There’s little sense of how these people actually relate
with each other, let alone with the plot and emotions of the film.
Consequentially, the film grows aimless and overlong, wobbling through a
concept that once seemed so promising. By the end, I felt my patience running
thin.
At one point, Lange’s character tells her daughter that she
chooses to forgive, happy for all the things done right instead of focusing on
the things done wrong. That’s how I’d like to approach this film. I appreciate all
involved for sneaking something slightly raw (I said slightly) and more complicated (again, slightly) than you’d expect from a slick Hollywood romance. But as
I sat there, I kept imagining a movie that really gave in to the kind of
intricate emotional territory the concept suggests, a slick psychological drama
of a romance that really dug into the couple’s relationship instead of
presenting it in moments of greeting-card uplift. I think the actors are ready
to go there, but the material doesn’t let them. But that they even get part of
the way there is something of some small interest.
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