ROMANCE SPARKS SOME TREPIDATION, BUT WORKS
Yes, it’s a weeper, but stars, script, music all help in Me Before You
Given the poster for this film, the medical tragedy in the plot and its based-on-a-novel pedigree, I walked into Me Before You with some trepidation: Would this be like a Nicholas Sparks adaptation?
Good news — or, depending on your film preferences, bad news: It isn’t. Oh, it skates close to the edge at times, and it’s definitely a weeper, with enough hokey moments to stock one of those all-cheese restaurants.
But it flies above its Sparksian brethren on the strength of its co-stars, and on a script that only occasionally sinks to platitudinous depths.
Starting on the left-hand side of that poster is Emilia Clarke, shedding her Game of Thrones persona of Daenerys Targaryen — though wearing considerably more clothes — to play plain old Lou Clark, an unemployed teashop waitress who applies for a job as a caregiver to a quadriplegic man.
That would be Will Traynor, played by Sam Claflin (Finnick Odair in the Hunger Games movies). An opening scene, shot by director Thea Sharrock like a high-end perfume commercial, establishes Will as a London mover and shaker — that is, until an unfortunate meeting with a speeding motorcycle robs him of almost all feeling from the neck down.
Will already has a man (Stephen Peacocke) to look after his more indecorous physical needs; Lou is hired by Will’s wealthy parents (Janet McTeer and Charles Dance, nicely cast) to provide companionship and assistance where needed. “You and Will can work out your level of ... interaction,” McTeer tells her awkwardly.
In the beginning, this consists of Lou being relentlessly upbeat and daffy in the manner of Bridget Jones. (Except, you know, actually British.) Will shoots her withering looks and sarcasm. But eventually he warms to her charms, and moves from sarcastic to merely sardonic.
Throughout the film he addresses her jauntily as Clark, as though he’s a sea captain or sergeant major. And the two of them have real chemistry, mostly founded on the fact that they look each other in the eye when speaking. It’s amazing how often bad sightlines can ruin a good movie romance.
As the relationship pushes beyond the merely platonic, Lou’s boyfriend (Matthew Lewis) starts to feel worried. But in one of the film’s more cliché moves, the boyfriend is so obsessed with exercise that we can’t really root for him, unless it’s to win the London marathon.
There are some other genre transgressions, including a relentlessly on-the-nose soundtrack — Ed Sheeran’s Photograph or Unsteady by X Ambassadors for the really sad moments, violins and pianos throughout. But it’s hard to fault a movie that sings the praises of subtitled entertainment; honestly, if Me Before You turns even one person into a fan of Xavier Beauvois’s sublime 2010 drama Of Gods and Men, it’ll have been worth the pain.
The film is also gorgeous to behold. Will lives next to (and apparently owns) Pembroke Castle in western Wales. And the wardrobe budget must have pushed into the thousands — admittedly mounting in one- and five-pound increments as the filmmakers scoured Britain’s charity shops for Lou’s crazy assortment of polka-dot skirts, fuchsia tights and fuzzy sweaters.
Me Before You also touches on a thorny moral/philosophical issue. Readers of Jojo Moyes’s novel (she also wrote the screenplay) will know what it is, but best to leave it unspoiled for those who don’t.
Suffice to say it’s not given a full hearing, but then that’s not why we’re watching this movie. We’re watching it because we promised our significant other a Valentine’s date, but what with the weather and the problem of finding a babysitter and that thing at our in-laws’ it kind of got away. Well, we’ll make it up this weekend. And for an encore, we’ll rent Of Gods and Men on DVD.