Friends until the bitter end
Miss You Already PG Cert, 112 min
★★★ ★★ Dir Catherine Hardwicke
Starring Drew Barrymore, Toni Collette, Dominic Cooper, Paddy Considine, Jacqueline Bisset
Miss You Already is a bit of a title tip-off: someone’s going to die, right? This dramedy about BFFs Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette doesn’t leave us guessing for long. It’s Collette’s Milly, a PR exec, who gets the sit-down from her radiologist 10 minutes in. It’s breast cancer, and she’s left it too late.
Milly and Jess (Barrymore) are childhood pals. In her twenties, Milly met a rakish art-rocker (Dominic Cooper) and had two kids with him. Jess is with an oil rig worker (Paddy Considine, sturdy as ever), and they’ve been trying hard for children of their own, which has only just worked. All of this the script conveys in a keep-up flurry practically before we’ve settled into our seats.
The film could have done with a richer sense of what Milly and Jess really see in each other. It’s as if Barrymore and Collette have been flung into this relationship unprepared, and must hustle to suggest there’s much of a history. Then again, something considerable is gained from spending most of the running time preparing for the worst. Unlike your usual third-act cancer twists, this has time to do dramatic justice to an advancing disease.
Catherine Hardwicke doesn’t spare us the grisly specifics. Milly has to explain what chemotherapy is to her children, and then undergo it in detail, and then lose her hair.
Halfway through, she has an affair with a hot barman (US rocker Tyson Ritter); this is more like it – we’re being adult enough to admit that sex matters even to the dying, and Collette plays this fling with the reckless abandon of a last hurrah. Next, she drags Jess to the Yorkshire Moors – they’re both big fans of Wuthering Heights – and their drunken rendition of R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion is another bucket-list moment they didn’t know was coming.
Finally we buy into them as believable friends doing believably embarrassing things.