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Thursday, February 9, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW
The Vow
Forget-Me-Nots, To Help Her To Remember Love

Rachel McAdams as Paige and Channing Tatum as Leo in "The Vow", directed by Michael Sucsy.  Sony Pictures/Screen Gems
    
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Thursday, February 9, 2012

Inspired by true events, Michael Sucsy's romantic drama "The Vow" awkwardly pieces together the journey of Paige (Rachel McAdams), a Chicagoan suffering from memory loss after a traumatic brain injury received in a car crash.  Emerging from a coma she has no recollection of her marriage to Leo (Channing Tatum), who spends the majority of the film trying to show her the love she had for him prior to the car accident.

"The Vow" issues its nuptials as binding resolution -- the primal headquarters of memory and belonging -- the one thing that is supposedly ironclad in marital relations.  Yet both literally and figuratively vows and the film itself prove shaky.  "Three" marriages, if you will, are tested.  One by Paige's ex-fiancé (Scott Speedman), another by Paige's meddlesome father (Sam Neill) and a "third" by Paige's aforementioned lack of memory.  The screenplay though, is the film's biggest troublemaker overall, testing the realms of credulity and reasonable dialogue.  As written by Abby Kohn, Mark Silverstein and Jason Katims, Paige is too broadly drawn as a character, made to look like a cardboard fool bumbling in the caricatured and stereotypical way of a movie amnesiac character rather than a person genuinely searching for the essence of her memory and recall. 

Paige knows who her parents are but spends too much time rhetorically remarking about her inability to remember.  Redundant and over-baked, the screenplay places poor Paige in the dark, forgetting that she already wears a blindfold.  Leo is frustrated by his wife's lack of recollection and waxes on about it.  Worse, he narrates the film, explaining that the elements of moments and memory just have to wait to coalesce.  Leo's narration is more patient than he is, and "The Vow" wills its events to happen.  Pixie dust lies at the film's edges, dust just waiting to be sprinkled, but the closest thing unleashed is either the smelly stuff that hits the fan circulating in the film's writing department or the confetti that flutters during the wedding of Paige's sister Gwen (Jessica McNamee).

Mr. Sucsy captures two of Chicago's most impressive features: its skyline and great architecture, but the people who inhabit the story he directs look mechanical if not downright silly.  Leo is played smarter by Mr. Tatum than he's shown to be -- taking a disoriented Paige home to a cadre of friends and well-wishers and realizing it was a mistake -- after spending so much time preaching gradual steps to slowly bring Paige back to a "normalized" life.  Leo also withholds a key secret that would help solve all of Paige's memory problems in about five minutes, and its big reveal much later makes Leo look as foolish as the script.  The poor dialogue makes the characters and film awkward.  When Paige's mother Rita (Jessica Lange) explains a decision she's made, many of her words ring unconvincingly and with forced emotion. 

"The Vow" is coated with some tenderness and sentimentality but while the good actors on display here (Mr. Tatum and Ms. McAdams in particular) try hard to elevate the lukewarm, clunky and badly-scripted material they don't quite bring the film to mediocre.  Ms. McAdams ("Morning Glory", "Midnight In Paris") turns some episodes into laughs but I'm not sure the script intended them as such.  Perhaps Ms. McAdams knew the screenplay needed more oomph, and decided instead to turn a serious film into a stress-relieving exercise.  She and Mr. Tatum attempt to shift the distracted script from irrelevant and trifling matters, particularly in the film's flimsy final act.  They should be applauded for making half-cooked day-old omelets out of eggy stink bombs.

With: Wendy Crewson, Lucas Bryant, Tatiana Maslany, Joey Klein, Joe Cobden, Jeananne Goossen.

"The Vow" is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association Of America for an accident scene, sexual content, partial nudity and some language.  The film's running time is one hour and 44 minutes. 

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