Weepie with a feeling of deja boo-hoo
THERE is a dramatic device much favoured by TV soap writers, whereby tragedy and joy unfold at t he same time.
You know the sort of thing; if there is a roaring party at the Rovers or the Queen Vic, you can be certain that elsewhere someone will be having a miscarriage or committing suicide.
That is the decidedly unoriginal framework for this weepie about two best friends, one of whom, self-satisfied mother-of-two Milly (Toni Collette), is diagnosed with breast cancer while the other, Drew Barrymore’s Jess (whose American accent has remained miraculously pure even though she has lived in London since early childhood), finds she is finally, blessedly, pregnant.
No film suffers from a lack of originality alone but there are too many other contrivances here, above all that intense brand of middle- aged, middle-class female buddyship that exists only on screen.
With a woman director (Catherine Hardwicke) and writer (Morwenna Banks), and two such experienced leads, you would expect it all to feel more real, but nobody seems to open their mouths except to issue a wisecrack or a recrimination, while Milly’s mother (Jacqueline Bisset, no less) is a caricature only marginally less subtle than Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous.
Dominic Cooper and Paddy Considine, as the respective husbands, aren’t served a whole lot better and there is a strained Wuthering Heights motif that at one point whisks us from London to the Yorkshire moors; another implausible turn of events.
Nonetheless, there are significant issues here and at times they are robustly addressed. The camera does not flinch from mastectomy scars, for example, which doesn’t often happen in mainstream cinema.
Banks also deserves credit for not making her cancer sufferer the standard angel of goodness, but in giving Milly quite so many character flaws she risks draining our well of empathy. Long before the end, mine was far too dry for tears.