Movies like the ones we'll cover today take their share of ridicule and scorn from critics.....even though they base their stories on "real events" and real people......
The hatred and derision aimed at this these films comes from a suspicion that their motives are less than pure. These films may claim to inspire us and touch us deeply with their heavy cloaka of moral uplift and celebration of 'the human condition'......
........but then you always sense their primary goal is nothing more than to reduce you to a weeping mess and shamelessly tug on your heartstrings like an improvising jazz bass player.
They don't call 'em tearjerkers for nothin'...........
Cause in such a film, somebody's gonna end up pushing up daisies ....way, way before their time.
And because the movie sets up these future corpses as sweet, funny, loving, adorable people, you'll get put through the wringer watching them die a slow, painful, cancer-ridden death.
So clutch your tissue boxes close to your laps as BQ takes a look at these stories of the cutest, nicest folks to steal your hearts......until they start dropping dead.
All My Life (2020) One thing we do like about most 'dying young' movies - we don't have to spend a lot of time describing their plots.
A cute young couple, Jenn and Sol (Jessica Rothe, Harry Shum Jr.) meet cute and marry. Sol contracts liver cancer. Sol dies.
Contrary to what you may think, we've no intention of mocking this film. It strictly adheres to the 'dying young' playbook and doesn't embarrass itself with any mawkishly overdone tear-wringing.
And honestly, we're hard pressed to remember anything either outstanding or annoying about the movie. It never rises above or below the expected standards of its genre. It just is.........
If you're susceptible to such heart-tuggers, then you can consider this required viewing. For everyone else, there's nothing you haven't seen before and nothing particularly memorable. 2 stars (**
Our Friend (2019) is a far more expansive, ambitious and dramatically wrenching true story of a terminal cancer victim, her husband, their young daughters and their selfless best friend who becomes something of caregiver-babysitter to the entire suffering family.
As vivacious, warm hearted Nicole (Dakota Johnson) deteriorates from her illness, her ever brooding globe trotting journalist spouse Matt (Casey Affleck) can hardly cope. Their best friend Dane (Jason Segal), a feckless, humorous slacker who stumbled into a retail management career, gives up his own personal life (both dead end job and girlfriend) to join the family as a kind of unofficial live-in relative and invaluable helper.
To its great credit, the film is less interested in making you cry than it is in presenting a realistic excruciating depiction of how cancer tears and shreds its way through the fabric of a family. And unlike other 'dying young' movies, it's a far more accurate picture of the effects of enduring a slow-motion tragedy, on both the victim and those around her.
That dedication to realism proves also to be the film's undoing. Stretched into two very long hours, "Our Friend" sabotages itself with a lack of pacing and a terrible editing structure that randomly bounces the film around different timelines.
It positively revels in scenes where all the characters, under tremendous physical and emotional stress, behave badly with each other, but these moments get inserted in the movie with no dramatic shape or urgency that would give them more impact.
Other reviewers pondered the riddle of Segal's Dane.....as in 'what kind of person sacrifices himself and his life so nobly in service to this family?' We never had that big a problem figuring out Dane, who saw rescuing his friends as a higher calling than the limited, directionless existence he'd fallen into.
We can't recommend this one all that highly. As good as the performances are, it's weary to sit through and we couldn't contain a sense of relief when it finally ended. And audiences who'd flock to glossy grief-porn like "All My Life" would find it tiresome, too troubling for comfort and shouldn't go anywhere near it.......
Much to admire here, but we're still wondering if it was worth watching. 2 stars (**).
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