As fun as a barrel of carcinomatous monkeys, Catherine Hardwicke’s Miss You Already is destined to be dismissed by audiences like yours truly. Not because I’m a man and Miss You Already is a “women’s picture,” but because it so proudly flaunts its endless reservoir of hydrogenated sap and eye-rolling ludicrousness, the kind redeemed only by the sleight of hand of its capable actors.
At best it’s a competent Hallmark movie-of-the-week, and at worst it’s masochistic treacle for self-flagellating audiences, spending most of its time somewhere in the maudlin middle. No doubt its defenders will insist that it’s “not for critics,” and they’ll get no argument here.
From its opening seconds, Miss You Already stumbles, trading in hoary clichés about childbirth. Drew Barrymore’s Jess is about to produce a baby in a UK hospital, and like most births in stupid movies, it’s a frightful terror under dim fluorescence, with the mother gutturally beseeching her midwife for a painkiller, sounding like Linda Blair in The Exorcist for a cheap laugh.
The scene is a big deal for Jess, but we don’t realize it yet. We just know that her BFF Milly (Toni Collette) is absent from the room. The rest of the movie is essentially a flashback charting Jess and Milly’s midlife trials — but not before we suffer a hurried montage of their early years together, one of whose scenes involves a painless, preposterously tone-deaf loss of virginity. The narrative hasn’t even started yet, and we don’t buy it.
It isn’t until 15 minutes in, when Milly’s belated annual checkup reveals a cancerous lump in her breast, that Miss You Already charts its course, which is aimed more at edification than entertainment. The plot dutifully completes a checklist of cancer’s (and chemo’s) crippling side effects — vomiting, weakness, blue veins, hair loss, mastectomy, low self-esteem.
As a calculated guidebook to the cancer process, Miss You Already can feel like a filmed pamphlet in an oncology department, but at least it serves that purpose. To its credit, the film understands that the shrapnel of the cancer bomb affects loved ones and caregivers, too, the stresses compounding her relationships with Jess as well as Milly’s husband Kit (Dominic Cooper), a domesticated punk rocker, and their two children. Its best moments feel unsanitized.
It’s more difficult to defend the sputtering mechanics of Morwena Banks’ plotting. It’s inevitable that the protagonists’ personal traumas — in addition to Milly’s cancer, Jess is battling infertility issues affecting her relationship with her salt-of-the-earth husband Jago (Paddy Considine) — will threaten their inseparability, a conflict that comes to a head on Jess’ birthday. It’s a protracted process that feels twice as long as it is, saved only by the cinematography: The fight plays out on the Yorkshire Moors — Jess and Milly are Wuthering Heights obsessives — which provides a welcome visual distraction from the pedestrian verbal scuffle.
An accomplished comic actress from Cornwall, Banks adapted the movie from her play Goodbye, and it has all the overstated earnestness of a skilled comedian attempting to prove she’s more than punch lines. Hardwicke’s syrup-draining direction doesn’t help her case. She wastes no opportunity to wrench tears from her audience, presenting the film’s third act as an embarrassingly manipulative cavalcade of sentiment.
Restraint has never been a strong suit from the director of Thirteen, Twilight and Red Riding Hood, and for all its adult aspirations Miss You Already ultimately aims as low as empty-headed tween-lit.
MISS YOU ALREADY. Director: Catherine Hardwicke; Cast: Toni Collette, Drew Barrymore, Dominic Cooper, Jacqueline Bisset, Paddy Considine; Distributor: Lionsgate; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Today at theaters including Living Room Theaters, Cinemark Palace 20 and Regal Shadowood in Boca Raton, Cinemark Boynton Beach 14, Cobb Downtown at the Mall 16, Regal Royal Palm Beach 18 and Carmike Parisian 20 in West Palm Beach