Mark Reviews Movies: REDEEMING LOVE

Redeeming Love, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 20, 2022

Michael Hosea (Tom Lewis) seems like a nice guy. One has to give him that much. He's a godly farmer in 1850s California who, upon making a trip into town and praying that he might find a partner with whom to share his life, falls in love at first sight with Angel (Abigail Cowen).

She's an employee of a local brothel who is so sought after that the owner has to run a lottery every day, in order to determine which of the long line of men will have the chance to pay to have sex with her. Michael laughs when he learns this information, because it means the Big One upstairs obviously has a sense of humor. Still, that doesn't change the fact that Michael is convinced that he loves Angel, and the rest of Redeeming Love struggles to make that romance, these characters, and the non-stop streak of melodramatic bad luck that makes up the movie's plot convincing in any way.

The story comes from Francine Rivers' novel of the same name, and since the screenplay has been adapted from the book by the author and director D.J. Caruso, this movie is probably faithful to its source material—for whatever that's worth. If there's anything to these characters beyond their most obvious traits, though, that element of the tale has been lost in translation.

Here, Michael is a good and decent man, certain that his love will make a Madonna-like figure out of this woman whose trade is the oldest profession. A psychoanalyst would probably make quick work of Michael's motives and behavior, but we're left to watch as Rivers and Caruso treat the dichotomy of his thinking in regards to this woman with seemingly unaware sincerity.

In other words, it makes complete sense that the naïve farmer, having fallen for Angel, would want her to abandon her ways and become his wife. The odd thing is that the movie itself only sees Angel in those distinct terms, as well. She's either the abused, degraded, and almost masochistic prostitute, whose life has been defined by all sorts of physical and emotional pain, or the object of affection for a kind and selfless man, who can see past all of that and give her the life she never knew she wanted.

Michael, then, is a compassionate bore, but no matter which path she chooses, Angel remains less a person than a possession in the story's calculation. She's a dull nothing, but that's only because the screenwriters insist that's all she can be.

Much of this tale is about suffering, and there's also something a bit disheartening in how much the story seems to revel in ensuring that Angel receives the brunt of it. Flashbacks to her childhood, as the illegitimate daughter of a well-to-do man who's raised by her mother (played by Nina Dobrev), show her being rejected by her father (played by Josh Taylor)—until one of those cruel twists of fate has him unwittingly accepting her in another way—and losing the mother to illness.

After that, she's sold to the Duke (Eric Dane) for forced sex work in Boston, and upon escaping that place for California, Angel again finds herself having to have sex for money under the employ of the Duchess (Famke Janssen). Along the way and whenever she's not with Michael, Angel is insulted, debased, threatened, and beaten. If Michael sees his love for Angel as a kind of divine joke on him, the amount of the abuse she consistently receives in order to eventually—and, after returning to her ways a few times, repeatedly—agree to give marriage a shot feels like a terrible punch line.

After Michael rescues Angel from the brothel, the rest of the story has him trying to show her basic respect and the fruits of an honest day's work, while she is constantly drawn back to town because she believes he's too good for her. A bunch of complications—a petty brother-in-law (played by Logan Marshall-Green), who doesn't like the idea of a prostitute wearing his dead wife's clothes, and the arrival of the murderous Duke, who still holds a grudge—ensue amidst the ridiculous cycle of Angel running away and coming back to an always-forgiving Michael.

Cowen and Lewis don't sell the relationship, but separately, they do as much as they can with charm and determination to make us buy their respective, single-trait characters. Meanwhile, Caruso provides some dirty authenticity and romanticized nature in the backdrops (Thanks in large part to cinematographer Rogier Stoffers for the latter), but such elements of Redeeming Love are only brief distractions from the story's shallow, conventional, and kind of judgmental melodrama.

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