READ IT AND WEEP
JoJo Moyes’s bestseller is the ultimate tearjerker, but its big screen version may leave a few dry eyes in the house
Me Before You Cert: 12A Time: 1hr 50mins
Memo to all writers of what I know you won’t like me calling ‘chick-lit’ novels: you know the central female character you’ve worked so hard on, the one you’ve spent hours and hours making just the right blend of kooky yet lovable and blessed with that surprising passion for high heels, cupcakes or fresh bread? Of course you do – she’s your creation; you love her, you’re proud of her and you’re sure your readers will love her too. Well, be warned – when Hollywood comes a-calling and waving big cheque books around, just try to remember how much you love her because, casting-wise, it could, unless you’re very careful, be about to go horribly wrong.
My good friend Sophie Kinsella was lucky – she got the lovely Isla Fisher, an actress with that happy knack of improving just about every film she’s in, to play the retail-addicted Rebecca Bloomwood in Confessions Of A Shopaholic.
But others have not been so fortunate. The normally bankable Anne Hathaway was by far the weakest thing in the 2011 film version of David Nicholls’s bestseller One Day, largely because – wobbly Yorkshire accent notwithstanding – she was nobody’s idea of what Nicholls’s central character, Emma, looked or sounded like.
And now along comes Emilia Clarke, playing Lou in Jojo Moyes’s weepie, Me
Before You, and I’m afraid she’s worse. There will be men in the audience contemplating assisted suicide themselves rather than spend another minute in her simpering, over-ingratiating and, above all, irritating company.
This surely is not what Moyes had in mind when she wrote her bestseller about a young, warm-hearted waitress from a small town who takes a new job as a carer, only to fall in love with Will – played by Hunger Games star Sam Claflin – the handsome quadriplegic bloke she’s supposed to be looking after.
At this point, some of you will be asking ‘Emilia who?’ And I might have been too had I not recently become aware of a new unwritten rule in film viewing – every time an actor or actress you’ve never heard of suddenly pops up in a major role, you can be pretty much certain of the reason why: Game Of Thrones. I’m not a devotee, I’m afraid, but I’ve seen enough of Clarke’s popular turn as Daenerys, the Mother of Dragons, to know that she’s far more convincing in that than she is here. Maybe it’s the blonde wig; maybe it’s the dragons – who knows? But the fact is that in Game Of Thrones she’s good and here she isn’t. Apparently unaware of the old filmacting adage that ‘less is more’, she over-acts from scene-setting beginning to would-be tearjerking end. Her eyebrows almost deserve a credit of their own, while her facial expressions – for large parts – seem to range from ‘small simpering smile’ to ‘large simpering smile’ and back again with nothing in between. Having someone smiling all the time doesn’t automatically make them lovable. Indeed, in this particular case it just makes them annoying, which has a devastating knock-on effect on
how we perceive the rest of the film. Time and again, there are too obvious echoes of Bridget Jones – mini-skirt-malfunctions, Will’s habit of calling her by her surname, eccentric choice of work-wear and, of course, lashings of romantic snow whenever the story requires. And, in so far as Clarke’s performance reminds me of anything, it’s Renée Zellweger in Bridget mode... but on a bad day.
The formulaic shallowness of Moyes’s underlying story is also exposed. Will may be wheelchair-bound but, naturally, he’s dropdead handsome, hugely wealthy and, very conveniently, has a hunky Antipodean male carer who comes in and does, unseen, all the nasty, messy stuff that goes hand-in-rubberglove with life in a wheelchair but has no place in this sort of super-sanitised romantic fiction.
All Lou has to do is wander round looking pretty, work out imaginative ways to cheer him up, and desperately try not to fall in love with him. More than once it reminded me of 50 Shades Of Grey, although without the sex and with wheelchairs instead of handcuffs. It’s somehow depressingly symptomatic that the big romantic breakthrough comes after everyone’s flown by private jet to the Caribbean. What’s wrong with the local beach?
Too harsh? Well possibly – Claflin’s not bad (oh, how he must wish he was playing opposite his Love, Rosie co-star Lily Collins) and there are some nice supporting performances from Charles Dance, Janet McTeer and recent Doctor Who departee Jenna Coleman, who might have made a very good Lou herself but here has to settle for playing her older sister.
It may be that this is simply a film that divides the sexes and, possibly, the generations too. What laughing I could hear during the screening was largely female and young. And, as the end drew near (an end that might have more of an emotional impact if it was clearer what was happening), there was certainly some female snuffling going on. Normally, as a metrosexual man – I loved the not dissimilar The Fault In Our Stars, for instance – I can empathise with such emotion even if I don’t feel it myself. But, alas, not this time – Me Before You left me dryeyed and disappointed.
‘There are too obvious echoes of Bridget Jones… and lashings of romantic snow whenever required’