Mark Reviews Movies: THE SECRET: DARE TO DREAM

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 30, 2020

Rhonda Byrne's 2006 book The Secret is nothing new. Self-help books about handing over the power and fate of one's life to the power of positive thinking have been around since, well, even before Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking. It's a nice thought, for sure, that nice thoughts can change, not only your mood, but also your personal fulfillment, your luck in love, your financial situation, and anything else that's getting you down in this world.

What those other popular books of the hollow, unfounded, and unproven self-help variety didn't have, perhaps, was a movie inspired by them. Bryne's book has received one in the form of The Secret: Dare to Dream, an entirely fictional story testifying to the supposedly real power that Byrne's method could have on the lives of actual people. The concept of inventing a story to serve as proof of a self-help method's effectiveness is, at least, unintentionally an act of purest truth in advertising.

As for the movie itself, it's about as predictably weird and unnecessarily convoluted as one might expect from a movie inspired by such a book. It certainly doesn't help that every conflict in the story could have been resolved in about five minutes, if not for the delay on the part of the method's personification. One comes to believe that simple honesty isn't one of the primary, secondary, or even duodenary tenets of this program.

The plot features Miranda Wells (Katie Holmes), a widow and single mother of three kids, who insists she isn't poor but is broke. The bills are piling up, and it doesn't help that she has to get a root canal soon.

She has a severe sweet tooth, keeping saltwater taffies in the glove compartment of her minivan, and one wonders if Miranda realizes she could have saved money on the dental procedure and in general if she didn't have candy stored and ready to go whenever she's in the car. On a side note, one of the odder inconsistencies here is how the character, after being in excruciating pain while trying to chew one of her beloved taffies after visiting the dentist, doesn't have that problem ever again. She definitely tries, munching on ice cream in the middle of the night and agreeing to let her teenage daughter make even more taffies for the girl's birthday party. Common sense, apparently, is not on the list of rules for this self-help system.

Anyway, Miranda receives a mysterious visitor named Bray (Josh Lucas), who has arrived in town, just before a tropical storm or hurricane strikes, to give Miranda a mysterious envelope. The screenplay, written by no fewer than three screenwriters (Bekah Brunstettter, Rick Parks, and director Andy Tennant), revolves around Bray choosing not to give Miranda this potentially life-changing envelope. His excuse is that he'll do it when the universe (a tour of which ends the movie, just in case one might have thought its ambitions were ironic or anything like that) lets him know it's the right time.

In the little picture, this is simultaneously cheap as storytelling, dishonest behavior from Bray, and just cruel for Miranda, who becomes convinced she has to move out of her beloved home—the one in which she built a family with her late husband—and marry a manipulative, jealous restaurant owner (played by Jerry O'Connell) and face a life of misery (It's no wonder, one supposes, that she indulges in so many sweets). Bray keeps delaying, though, because he doesn't think it's the right time to give her the envelope or the mailbox where he put it blows away in the storm. Instead, he hangs around and fixes the giant hole in Miranda's roof, offering nuggets of wisdom about the universe providing for people who think positively.

In the big picture, then, doesn't this whole system come across as a transparent sham? It's not Miranda's optimistic thinking that changes anything. Indeed, it's that belief, practiced by Bray, that unnecessarily forces her to put up with the boyfriend, endure the judgement of her mother-in-law (played by Celia Weston), and worry that her own future and the futures of her children are in jeopardy.

The filmmakers, though, take all of this seriously, ignoring the sappiness of the plot and the characters, while also overlooking just how bad they've made the system they're attempting champion look. The Secret: Dare to Dream definitely isn't a good movie, but it's a far worse sales pitch.

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