There are two incredibly annoying people (Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh.) One of them has cancer.
A lot of implausible, contrived and mildly amusing things happen them before, during and after the diagnosis. But they remain very much in love and incredibly annoying. In fairness, they spend a lot of time being incredibly annoyed with each other.
He wants kids and she doesn’t want kids. He can see this is a problem and early on in the relationship he tries to discuss this in a very tongue-tied, socially awkward, British, but endearingly witty fashion. (“Because I'm worried that's there's a very distinct and real possibility that I am about to fall in love with you.”) She walks out on him, but he patches it up in the next scene by pretending to be a pizza delivery man and gate crashing a baby-shower she’s attending. I had to keep consciously reminding myself that he was being played by the second Peter Parker and not the Tenth Doctor Who. She is more intense but also witty, and says 'fuck' a lot, particularly while she is being a chef.
Just to make matters even more annoying, the story is non-linear. Non linear storytelling is a thing, definitely. Orson Welles famously did it quite well. Last year we had the very clever Monster which showed how the same events could look very different from different points of view. I think that what we have here is basically three time lines intertwined: the “how they met” story line; the “her pregnancy” story line; and the “her cancer” story line. We jump between the three without any overt signals; but I don’t think narrative cause and effect are ever disrupted within the individual threads. I suppose the idea is that we see her cancer diagnosis right at the beginning of the film; so “This character has cancer” is a premise, not a mid-point twist.
There is a moment where it looks as if the film is going to be about something. She wonders if, given her chances of survival aren’t great, it wouldn’t be better to forgo the treatment and make sure that her final months with him are happy and worthwhile. He is so tongue tied and awkward that he can’t, in the end, tell her exactly where he stands on this, but he writes it down and she reads it so we never quite find out. I found this quite annoying.
Individual scenes are well done. The sequence where Mum and Dad have to tell their little girl (they got over the “kids” issue) that Mummy is very sick is quite sweet, and if you can put up with quite a lot of scenes of leading ladies on toilets and in baths, the pregnancy thing feels quite real. The awkward moment the oncologist delivers bad news, says that it’s OK to not be OK and then offers them a chocolate has just about the right amount of trivial banality. (Sir John Betjeman made the same point in a poem called Devonshire Street, I recall.)
I often come out of films thinking “How did that get made? What was the pitch?” Cynically, one could say that the pitch here was that Andrew Garfield wants to move into the space vacated by Hugh Grant. But I think its may actually have been “Let’s do a sad film about death a cancer, but then treat it as a goofy sit com.” When he needs to drive is pregnant wife to the hospital, he finds he’s been blocked in by two other drivers; she starts obsessively grabbing food in a motorway service station. But the silliness mitigates against the actual subject matter. These aren’t people; they are barely even tropes. They are more like cogs or construction lines: one-liner delivery mechanisms in a machine designed to not-quite make you cry. The Very Bad Thing eventually happens off stage, and we’re left with a coda which seems to imply that everyone eventually got over it. It would have been impossible to show Ella reacting to the death of her mummy: it's not kind of film.
I saw the trailer several times before the I saw the actual movie. It was quite intriguing. A lot of disconnected scenes with sharp dialogue, and absolutely no clues about what they were about and how they joined up. I felt pretty much exactly the same way about the actual film.
Tobias and Almut initially meet because Almut accidentally knocks Tobias down with her car. While Tobias is crossing a main road. In his dressing gown. Because he needed to sign the divorce papers from his previous marriage and there was no working pen in his hotel room. And, as Jane Austen might have said, I do declare that it is the most natural and believable thing either of them do in the entire movie.
He wants kids and she doesn’t want kids. He can see this is a problem and early on in the relationship he tries to discuss this in a very tongue-tied, socially awkward, British, but endearingly witty fashion. (“Because I'm worried that's there's a very distinct and real possibility that I am about to fall in love with you.”) She walks out on him, but he patches it up in the next scene by pretending to be a pizza delivery man and gate crashing a baby-shower she’s attending. I had to keep consciously reminding myself that he was being played by the second Peter Parker and not the Tenth Doctor Who. She is more intense but also witty, and says 'fuck' a lot, particularly while she is being a chef.
Just to make matters even more annoying, the story is non-linear. Non linear storytelling is a thing, definitely. Orson Welles famously did it quite well. Last year we had the very clever Monster which showed how the same events could look very different from different points of view. I think that what we have here is basically three time lines intertwined: the “how they met” story line; the “her pregnancy” story line; and the “her cancer” story line. We jump between the three without any overt signals; but I don’t think narrative cause and effect are ever disrupted within the individual threads. I suppose the idea is that we see her cancer diagnosis right at the beginning of the film; so “This character has cancer” is a premise, not a mid-point twist.
There is a moment where it looks as if the film is going to be about something. She wonders if, given her chances of survival aren’t great, it wouldn’t be better to forgo the treatment and make sure that her final months with him are happy and worthwhile. He is so tongue tied and awkward that he can’t, in the end, tell her exactly where he stands on this, but he writes it down and she reads it so we never quite find out. I found this quite annoying.
Individual scenes are well done. The sequence where Mum and Dad have to tell their little girl (they got over the “kids” issue) that Mummy is very sick is quite sweet, and if you can put up with quite a lot of scenes of leading ladies on toilets and in baths, the pregnancy thing feels quite real. The awkward moment the oncologist delivers bad news, says that it’s OK to not be OK and then offers them a chocolate has just about the right amount of trivial banality. (Sir John Betjeman made the same point in a poem called Devonshire Street, I recall.)
I often come out of films thinking “How did that get made? What was the pitch?” Cynically, one could say that the pitch here was that Andrew Garfield wants to move into the space vacated by Hugh Grant. But I think its may actually have been “Let’s do a sad film about death a cancer, but then treat it as a goofy sit com.” When he needs to drive is pregnant wife to the hospital, he finds he’s been blocked in by two other drivers; she starts obsessively grabbing food in a motorway service station. But the silliness mitigates against the actual subject matter. These aren’t people; they are barely even tropes. They are more like cogs or construction lines: one-liner delivery mechanisms in a machine designed to not-quite make you cry. The Very Bad Thing eventually happens off stage, and we’re left with a coda which seems to imply that everyone eventually got over it. It would have been impossible to show Ella reacting to the death of her mummy: it's not kind of film.
I saw the trailer several times before the I saw the actual movie. It was quite intriguing. A lot of disconnected scenes with sharp dialogue, and absolutely no clues about what they were about and how they joined up. I felt pretty much exactly the same way about the actual film.
Tobias and Almut initially meet because Almut accidentally knocks Tobias down with her car. While Tobias is crossing a main road. In his dressing gown. Because he needed to sign the divorce papers from his previous marriage and there was no working pen in his hotel room. And, as Jane Austen might have said, I do declare that it is the most natural and believable thing either of them do in the entire movie.
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