Reminders of Him

Reminders of Him tells a story about death, trauma, bitterness, forgiveness, and redemption, but it’s so determined to be cozy and uplifting that there’s never a moment for the audience to briefly worry that everything won’t turn out all right — it’s not just anti-drama, it’s niceness porn. Thankfully, this latest adaptation of a Colleen Hoover best-seller (written for the screen by Hoover and Lauren Levine) has a secret weapon: actress Maika Monroe, whose film-noir eyes radiate the loss, hurt, and disappointment that Reminders of Him is otherwise all too eager to paper over.

Set in Laramie, Wyoming (and shot in Calgary), the vastness of the sky and the beautiful mountain ranges — and the insistence of cinematographer Tim Ives (Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret) upon including those vistas in every shot possible — go a long way toward keeping the storytelling from becoming too grim, even when Monroe’s Kenna comes back into town and snags an apartment at a shabby complex called Paradise. (Complete with a giant neon sign, whose letters might as well read M-E-T-A-P-H-O-R.)

Kenna’s been gone for seven years, serving prison time for a DUI accident that resulted in the death of her boyfriend Scotty (Rudy Pankow). Consumed with guilt, Kenna showed no remorse at the trial, although she found a reason to live when she later discovered she was carrying Scotty’s child. Alas, his parents Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford) swooped in and took custody of young Diem (Zoe Kosovic); Kenna has returned to Laramie in the hopes of meeting her child for the first time.

Further complicating Kenna’s return is the fact that Scotty’s best friend Ledger (Tyriq Withers, Him), a former NFL player who left the Broncos after an injury, has been renting the house across the street from Grace and Patrick and serving as a stand-in dad to the young girl, who’s just old enough to start asking question about her mother’s whereabouts. Kenna and Ledger have a meet-cute at the bar he owns — since he was away playing football when Scotty and Kenna were a couple, they’d never met before — but once he realizes who she is and why she’s in town, he finds himself torn between his feelings for her and his instinct to protect Diem from a woman whom Grace and Patrick think of as a monster.

Big emotions are on display here, with major decisions to be made and reckonings to be reached, but the screenwriters and director Vanessa Caswill (the BBC’s Little Women) don’t trust their audience’s ability to sit with a character’s pain. At almost every turn, a potentially gut-wrenching moment — Ledger stops Grace and Diem from unknowingly walking into the grocery store where Kenna works, for instance — is buffered with egregious sentimentality, usually from Diem or from Kenna’s developmentally disabled co-worker Lady Diana (Monika Myers), both of whom the film reduces to cuteness props, not unlike the kitten Kenna adopts upon moving into her apartment.

Both Withers and Pankow deliver the kind of soft-eyed sweetness that’s the stock in trade for male leads of female-driven romantic dramas, and Graham squeezes what she can out of a character who’s mainly a plot device. (We spend the film waiting for Grace to show grace.) But it’s Monroe’s show all the way, imbuing genuine grief and regret into this three-hankie spectacle.

Tear-jerkers are valuable to cinema; they can provide emotional catharsis as satisfying as any other kind of popcorn entertainment. It’s hard to get misty-eyed, however, over a film that never stops reassuring you that everyone’s going to get a happy ending. Let the audience feel bad for a while, so they can feel good after; failing that leaves everyone feeling nothing.

Director: Vanessa Caswill
Screenwriters: Lauren Levine & Colleen Hoover, based on the novel by Colleen Hoover
Cast: Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Rudy Pankow, Lainey Wilson, Lauren Graham, Bradley Whitford
Executive producer: Robin Mulcahy Fisichella
Producers: Colleen Hoover, Lauren Levine, Gina Matthews
Director of photography: Tim Ives
Production design: Francesca Massariol
Editing: Michelle Harrison
Music: Tom Howe
Sound design: Warren Hendriks, sound designer/re-recording mixer; Anna MacKenzie, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Universal Pictures, Heartbones, Little Engine Productions
In English
114 minutes