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THE LAST LETTER FROM YOUR LOVER
Director: Augustine Frizzell Cast: Felicity Jones, Shailene Woodley, Callum Turner, Joe Alwyn, Nabhaan Rizwan, Ben Cross, Diana Kent MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:50 Release Date: 7/23/21 (Netflix) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 22, 2021 Both of the romances in The Last Letter from Your Lover are overly familiar and pretty dull. One takes place in a modern-day office. The other unfolds over years in the past, as well-to-do married woman has a start-and-stop-and-start-again affair with a man of lesser means. The one thing, perhaps, that the second romance has, which the first one doesn't, is a case of amnesia. Well, it has that, and it also has a bit of mystery, since the woman with memory loss doesn't know the identity of her lover, what caused the affair to end, or the lover's fate. That's what we, as well as the present-day soon-to-be lovers, learn, and it's not quite as intriguing or romantic as the filmmakers seem to believe it is. The screenplay, written by Nick Payne and Esta Spalding (based on Jojo Moyes' novel), is very much focused on events—all of the familiar turns and mostly predictable twists of the love story from the past. We first meet Jennifer Stirling (Shailene Woodley), the wife of Laurence (Joe Alwyn), as she returns from the hospital following a car accident. The year is 1965, and the place is London. The husband to whom Jennifer returns is bland, self-absorbed, and a bit controlling, but the house is nice. The car crash left her with that most conveniently inconvenient of melodramatic maladies: amnesia. Jennifer can sense that something is wrong with her marriage, but she can't quite figure out what it is. As she explores the house, the wife stumbles upon a letter and then another and another after that. They're from a man who refers to himself as "B" or "Boot," and the contents of the letters are all about the deepest of loves and fighting against doubts and making plans to live freely together. Jennifer needs to learn the identity of this man is and find him. It's an interesting start, at least. All of that mystery, though, goes out the window with the introduction and development of the modern-day scenes. They revolve around Ellie (Felicity Jones), a low-end reporter at a London newspaper who's still reeling from a failed romantic relationship. Ellie doesn't care much about love anymore, so she's having a series of one-night stands. She's not much of a friend, either, leaving her pals behind on the event of one colleague's birthday party. As for her professionalism, she takes an assignment to write-up a tribute to a recently deceased former editor of the paper, only to spend the rest of the movie digging into the completely unrelated romance that 1965 Jennifer can't remember. It's a good thing her own editor seems to forget the actual assignment. The back-and-forth plotting has Ellie uncovering letters from Jennifer's lover, with the help of adorably awkward archivist Rory (Nabhaan Rizwan), and in the process, the investigation undermines all of the initial mystery of Jennifer's story. We quickly learn that, while living with Laurence in the French Riviera, Jennifer meets journalist Anthony (Callum Turner), writing a puff piece about her husband, and gradually falls for his slightly less-bland attitude and lifestyle. From there, the particulars of this mystery amount to only a matter of filling in the few blanks. We know where and how this inevitably doomed romance will end, since the screenplay establishes that immediately with Jennifer's accident and Anthony's absence. We're just left to watch as the forbidden lovers act out the sentimental platitudes from the letters, without any sense of them as actual people beyond the necessity of being part of a star-crossed romance. The modern-day romance between Ellie and Rory is weaker in terms of developing the characters and making it seem less predictable than it inevitably is (As for how the story in the present relates to the one in the past on a narrative or thematic level, one just has to wait for the plots to intersect and for Ellie to sum up what she has learned from the decades-old affair). This romance is, though, at least stronger on account of the charms of the actors. Jones and Rizwan are allowed to have a bit of fun with the playful banter and the growing attraction between these two. While it's less a matter of whether or not these two will get together and more a matter of when they will, there's at least some engaging chemistry between the actors to watch. That's more than can be said about the tale in the past, which hits all of the familiar beats (obstacles and doubts and misunderstandings and being separated/reunited by fate) without much charm, chemistry, or sense of the broadly romantic. We can more or less figure out everything that's going to happen in the past and present of The Last Letter from Your Lover, but that shouldn't matter. The problem is that the filmmakers themselves treat all of this as a foregone conclusion. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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