Twangs for nothing
No country song or sentiment gets left behind in this flimsy fantasy
There hasn’t been a Nicholas Sparks adaptation on the screen in two years now, but Forever My Girl is the next best/worst thing, arriving just early enough that if you see it right away, you may get the taste out of your mouth before Valentine’s Day. If Sparks ever wrote a country song, this movie would be its music video.
Alex Roe stars as country singer Liam Page. (The film is riddled with country music. Take that as a promise or a warning.) In the opening scene, he leaves his fiancée, Josie (Jessica Rothe), on their wedding day, never to return.
OK, that would be too easy. Cut to eight years later and Liam, now a megastar, learns that an old friend has passed away in his hometown. He comes back for the funeral and runs into Josie, who now runs a flower shop. (Of course she does.) She also has an adorable daughter, aged eight years minus nine months. You do the math.
Writer-director Bethany Ashton Wolf does a good job of setting up the characters and plot, and there’s some decent chemistry between the leads, and even more from the precocious kid, played by Abby Ryder Fortson.
But the problem is that the film requires Liam to be the world’s biggest jerk on his wedding day (he doesn’t even have a decent excuse for missing it), and to spend the next eight years solidifying that personality. And while Forever My Girl trades in many of the rom-com genre’s clichés, it does not, alas, include a sassy best friend who can tell Josie that this guy is bad news.
Sure, he wants to become a father to the daughter he never knew he had — though he would have known if he’d called even once in the intervening 3,000 days. Sure, his dad is willing to forgive him and give him a second chance. But as town pastor, that’s practically his job. Sure, he’s got a wise manager who doubles as a family-man role model. But that only serves to highlight how daffy some of these characters are.
The movie operates on several levels of flimsy fantasy simultaneously, but not the guilty-pleasure level that can be achieved when likable characters are kept apart by unlikely circumstances.