Best to tune this one out
No country song or sentiment ignored
There hasn’t been a Nicholas Sparks adaptation on the screen in two years, 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.
London-born Alex Roe does a credible Southern twang as country singer Liam Page. (The film is riddled with country music; take that as a promise or warning.) Liam 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 an old friend died in his hometown. He comes back for the funeral and runs into Josie, who runs a flower shop. (Of course she does.) She also has an adorable daughter, aged eight years minus nine months. You do the math.
Second-time writer/director Bethany Ashton Wolf (her first was a 2006 festival charmer called Little Chenier) does a good job 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.
The problem is the film requires Liam to be the world’s biggest jerk on his wedding day (he doesn’t even have a decent excuse) and 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 this guy is bad news.
Sure, he wants to be 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; but as the town pastor, that’s practically his job. Sure, he’s got a wise manager who doubles as a role model. But that only serves to highlight how daffy these characters are.
The movie operates on several levels of flimsy fantasy simultaneously, and not the guilty-pleasure level that can be achieved when likable characters are kept apart by unlikely circumstances.