‘Miss You Already’ lacks realistic take on illness — and friendship

Some will see “Miss You Already” as a beautiful story of love and death, friendship and mortality, and if people want to enjoy it in that way, why stop them? But “Miss You Already” is something else, not a movie that inspires sympathetic reflection but one that allows audiences to experience the terrors and horrors of illness without any of the consequences. It is the moral equivalent of an action movie, and the fact that the subject is mortal illness makes it a little obscene.

In Hollywood films, every sickness leads to the grave, and though it’s proper that art should honor and incorporate the experiences of people who have died, this onesided tendency is so much morbidness disguised as sensitivity. Bodies heal. Treatments are successful. People do brush by death and come back, and presumably they have stories, too. But such stories don’t provide the muted thrill-ride sense of watching the worst that can happen from the safety of a theater.

For about five minutes, “Miss You Already” is the tale of a friendship between two women, who meet in London as little girls in school. Milly (Toni Collette) is selfish, impulsive and fun, and Jess (Drew Barrymore) is even-tempered, considerate and reliable. Milly has a glamorous life with a successful businessman husband (Dominic Cooper), while Jess and her husband (Paddy Considine) are struggling. But the women remain fast friends.

Then one day, Milly breezes into her doctor’s office with all the carefree insouciance that only movie characters have when arriving to get the results of a cancer screening. The doctor, who has the bedside manner of a Halloween skeleton, tells her she has breast cancer and needs chemotherapy. From there, the trajectory of the movie is set. Milly is sick, and Jess and her husband are trying to get pregnant. From here, you can probably outline the remaining 90 minutes.

Perhaps if Jess and Milly really seemed like friends and the friendship were interesting and vital, “Miss You Already” would seem less like illness porn and more like something happening to specific individuals. But the friendship seems to consist of little but dumb wisecracks. Milly breaks the news that she has malignant lesions on her brain, and Jess gets off a few one-liners. There’s no connection to the way actual people would behave in such moments, just the distant sound of a computer keyboard and a screenwriter’s attempt to soften a grim script with the steady patter of false levity.

To her credit, Morwenna Banks makes Milly into something more than a victim. Illness doesn’t make her saint but rather accentuates her manipulative and self-centered qualities. But it’s in the relationship with Jess that the movie must locate its heart. Banks structures their story as one might structure a romance, then relies on the cheapest dramatic device of romantic films — the bogus argument that comes two thirds into the picture.

Really? Your best friend is dying, and you get into a spat and go months without seeing her? And never call her? And she never calls you? Is this really an honest portrait of a beautiful and intense friendship between women? What’s intense about it, or beautiful, or honest?