Love story? No, an insidious ad for Dignitas
Our film critic’s damning verdict on a surprise hit
WITHOUT a doubt, Me Before You is the box office triumph of the summer so far, unexpectedly reaching the number one spot in its second week of release.
But it has not taken UK cinemas by storm without sparking furious argument, erupting around the story’s moral message.
If you are planning to join the tens of thousands of cinema-goers undeterred by the poor critical response to this mawkish weepie, and did not read the novel on which it is based either, then this article comes with a heavy spoiler warning.
But in truth, the movie’s own trailer pretty much lets the cat out of the bag, not to mention the growing controversy as disability campaigners protest that the film carries a truly terrible message.
Based on the best-selling 2012 novel by Jojo Moyes, the film tells the story of a romance between an able-bodied young woman and a wheelchair-bound man.
Envisaging only an intolerable future for himself, even as he becomes head over heels in love, he resolves to end it all — to the understandable horror of our heroine.
As the film continues to pack them in at the multiplexes — taking £8 million at the UK box office in under a month — its critics are concerned about whether it amounts to very much more than an extended advert for Dignitas, the assisted dying organisation based in Switzerland.
In the words of one critical viewer, wheelchair-user Nikki Kenward, the audience is ‘manipulated, coerced and driven right into the hands of the pro- euthanasia lobby, without any thought for truth, balance or meaningful discussion’.
If so, it could not come at a more sensitive time in the national debate over whether to legalise euthanasia.
Only last week the British Medical Association voted to continue its opposition to assisted suicide, but a third of its members wanted the doctors’ union to adopt a ‘neutral’ stance.
Assisted suicides are legal in Switzerland but not in the UK, with many people fearing that any step towards accepting mercy-killing is a slippery slope, leading to many more deaths than lawmakers might intend.
MPs last year rejected Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill, which would have made it legal for a terminally ill person to request assistance with ending their life in Britain if they had less than six months to live. But the campaign continues.
AUTHOR Moyes, who also wrote the Me Before You screenplay, rejects the link and says her tale is not an endorsement of assisted dying. ‘I feel passionately that this should not be seen as a how-to manual,’ Moyes insists of the movie.
The film’s director, Thea Sharrock, believes the story has been ‘fundamentally misunderstood’.
But there can surely be no misunderstanding the manipulative way in which the film romanticises assisted suicide, presenting it as a kind of gift to the griefstricken partner left behind, and greatly preferable to life in a wheelchair for a young man who is paralysed from the neck down.
In fact, far from the character’s death-wish being alleviated by the boundless adoration of a good (and extremely attractive) woman, it actually seems to strengthen.
Since supporters of the rights of the disabled and anti- euthanasia group Not Dead Yet picketed last month’s London premiere, the row has escalated.
Francesco Clark, an American who was left paralysed in his early 20s after accidentally diving into the shallow end of a swimming pool, thinks the film undermines everything he tried to do in his book, Walking Papers, which chronicles the ways in which his life changed once he became disabled.
‘I’ve worked tirelessly to show people that being quadriplegic isn’t the end of your life, it’s another beginning,’ he says. ‘I will continue to spread a message of positivity and hope for those who have experienced spinal cord injuries, either directly or as a loved one.’
He has a further grievance, because his memoir is referred to in the film without his permission. ‘While I understand that this movie is based on a work of fiction,’ he says, ‘my book, and my life, is not.’
Certainly, the film is first and foremost a commercial love story, which conveniently glosses over the starker realities of quadriplegia.
Moyes has said that the story was loosely inspired by the tale of 23year- old Daniel James, a highly promising rugby player until a training-ground accident left him paralysed from the waist down. His injuries were not terminal but he ended his life at Dignitas in 2008.
For her story, she invents the character of Will Traynor, played in the film by The Hunger Games actor Sam Claflin. He is a dishy banker who seems to have the world at his feet when he suffers a dreadful road accident, leaving him ‘trapped’ in an electric wheelchair.
He tells his rich, upper- class parents (played by Charles Dance and Janet McTeer) that he is unable to contemplate a long-term existence as a quadriplegic.
Hoping to dissuade him, they appoint pretty, working- class, gently bumbling Louisa Clark ( Emilia Clarke from Game Of Thrones) as his companion.
Despite an inauspicious start, Will and Louisa fall in love, a doublewhammy breaching both the class divide and his physical incapacity. Each improves the lot of the other. She offers him unconditional love, while he encourages her to broaden her horizons even as he narrows his — to the clinic in Switzerland.
In fairness to Moyes, the novel, while by her own admission hardly a towering work of literature, is a good deal more nuanced than the film. It provoked complaints and criticism too, but not nearly as many as the screen version.
On screen, Will’s profound disability is sanitised to a laughable extent. The greatest indignities he suffers are when his wheelchair gets stuck in the mud during a visit to the races, and when former colleagues are rather patronising towards him at his ex-girlfriend’s wedding.
Moreover, Claflin was cast because he is lovely to look at, not because he is especially good at playing disabled, still less disabled himself.
Had a wheelchair-bound actor been cast, the protests would not have been so vehement. But they would still have rung out. For disability rights campaigner Kim Sauder, it is morally questionable to give the formerly jet-setting, jet-skiing Will such an alpha-male background, for it implies that his paralysis is ‘more tragic, as if he lost more, and this is why he is unable to come to terms with being quadriplegic’.
But the core ethical question surely concerns the issue of assisted suicide, the myriad complexities of which are worryingly simplified.
Disabled actress Liz Carr, who plays forensics technician Clarissa Mullery in BBC’s Silent Witness, says the film ‘ blurs the line — conveniently — between wanting to die for reasons of terminal illness, which was being pushed for via the various Bills in the past couple of years in the UK, and someone who is disabled but not terminally ill wanting to end their life.’
Most controversially, Me Before You makes the decision to join Dignitas look not like a ghastly last resort, but the ultimate romantic gesture — a final gift to one’s beloved.
At the screening I went to, none of the young women sobbing into their popcorn would have argued with that. Of course, not even Shakespeare was above romanticising suicide; take romeo and Juliet. But his hero acts emotionally, not rationally, with the audience painfully aware that all hope is not lost (Juliet is still alive!) before he self-destructs. Me Before You, in contrast, offers no such signposts that its hero is making a disastrously wrong-headed decision. Will thinks not only that he is doing the right thing for himself, but also, crucially, that by ending his own life he is freeing Louisa to make the most of hers. That’s an incalculably dangerous message to give to the young people flocking to see this. Furthermore, the message is amplified by the casting of Claflin and Clarke. The Hunger Games series of films, in which Claflin starred as the heroic Finnick Odair, have so far taken well over a billion dollars at the global box office. And U.S. fantasy drama Game of Thrones, in which Clarke plays the dragon-riding Daenerys Targaryen, is a spectacular success on television. Both productions have vast, impressionable teen audiences. For those of us concerned about Me Before You’s possible impact on young people, it is of some consolation that Clarke’s performance is truly awful. Straining to be cutely lovable, she succeeds mainly in being acutely tiresome, gurning and simpering her way through the movie in what amounts to a masterclass in over-acting.
YET the cinema queues still form and the mass snuffling goes on, confounding the longestablished equation that international football tournaments in which England are playing have a negative impact on movie-going.
The explanation is simple, though. The demographic at which Me Before You is squarely aimed, and the people least likely to be distracted by the Euro 2016 tournament, are one and the same — teenage girls and young women in their 20s.
The audience numbers have also been boosted by a dearth of competition. In a notably thin month in UK cinemas, two of the main multiplex competitors to Me Before You are the woefully bad swords-and-sandals fantasy Gods of Egypt, and the even worse romantic comedy Mother’s Day, which stars Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson and Julia roberts.
The latter film has even been described by one U.S. critic as so badly conceived and executed that it is ‘vaguely evil’. Whether it is any better to wring romance out of assisted suicide is debatable.