Images courtesy of Amazon/MGM Studios and Amazon Prime Content Services.
LOVE OF YOUR LIFE— 4 STARS
LESSON #1: SUBTLE TITLING— The title of director Rachel Morrison’s new romantic drama, Love of Your Life, debuting on Amazon Prime, subtly announces the film’s central theme through two of the simplest grammatical nuances. Not beginning with a declarative “The” suggests people, under any number of circumstances, may experience more than one impactful chapter of romance in their lives. Even more delicately, there’s the use of the second-person possessive determiner “Your” instead of the first-person adjective “My.” That could imply the amount of adoration being experienced may not completely feel like one’s own. Label that a serious prophecy hidden right in the title.
Love of Your Life begins with a “Meet-Cute” between a 26-year-old hospital nurse named Maya (The Substance’s Margaret Qualley) and the Ph.D. student, Charlie (Gabriel Basso of Hillbilly Elegy), who is selling her an old nightstand for refurbishment via Facebook Marketplace. Immediately smitten, he asks her out on a date, and she obliges, beginning a lovely and spirited courtship of exploring interests and being each other’s decompression partners from their professions. Time-hopping to the next year in labeled chapters matching Maya’s age, the two have become a cohabiting long-term relationship, joined by a shared bestie named Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger of TV’s The White Lotus) always along for the youthful adventures and supportive encouragement.
LESSON #2: BRINGING FAMILY TO A FAMILY-LESS PERSON— In their second year together, Charlie and Maya discover a key difference in confidence between them as they approach the topic of marriage and becoming parents someday. Charlie grew up as the adopted son of a stable Cape Cod family (headed by the wonderful Catherine Keener and current Digger ensemble member Corey Johnson), whereas Maya is the product of a one-night stand who has and holds no family attachments. With that lack of history or upbringing and matching that opening lede of “your” versus “my,” Maya never feels fully comfortable around Charlie’s family. Attaching her personal journey to another’s often feels unnatural, borrowed, or out of place. While her character comes to welcome the chance to join a legitimate family, Qualley plays this existence with tremendous apprehension.
Nevertheless, the lovebirds pull off a surprise wedding in their apartment during a monsoon storm that has family and friends sweating from the power outage and partying with candles lit. While this could all fit in the present day, Love of Your Life, through a glance of the couple watching a TV news story, announces that this 27th year of Maya’s is 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, changing the entire gravity of the setting. Charlie is an immunocompromised asthmatic, and Maya gets it the worst as an overwhelmed nurse. When a crushing tragedy suddenly strikes, the screenplay of Julia Cox (Nyad) leaps to “thirty-one,” revealing a drastically changed Maya—traveling in Portugal, smoking cigarettes, and working remotely with telehealth clients.
LESSON #3: FLEEING GRIEF— The jump in time shows Maya with all the behaviors of a person fleeing grief. She has withdrawn from previous material and personal attachments. Emotional numbness has her drifting through drunken stupors and one-night stands. It may look like what one soon-to-be important presence—a new traveling British suitor named Felix, and played by red-hot Lanterns star Aaron Pierre—will call “solitary hedonism,” but it’s a destructive course of failing self-care after several layers of trauma. This inability of Maya to grieve and create stable connections with new and established people becomes the weight of Love of Your Life.
LESSON #4: SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT THING TO SAY—In a thicker script, Love of Your Life would be filled with stump speeches and one-sided monologues that pour emotions out by the bucketful. Instead, the shared sentiments struggle as much as the psyche. Morrison’s film is relatably filled with a collection of blemished characters so desperately searching for the right thing to say because, in many instances, there are no perfect words that fit, heal, or propel the difficult moments folks are going through. That’s not an imperfection of a weak dialogue, but rather the reality of the given situations at hand. The challenges, even with their grimness, feel tangible and appropriate to the drama. Nevertheless, bring the tissues.
Heavily established by her edgy resume in other genres, Love of Your Life is Margaret Qualley proving romance is within her acting arsenal as a rising star. Every actor worth their salt should put a movie like this on their resume to show their range. Qualley’s performance is shaped by a wringer of hopeful happiness, stubborn mistakes, worrisome terror, and fragile remorse. Her balance act of resolve elevates this walkabout journey higher than the typical, inescapable feeling-sorry-for-herself doldrums we’ve seen before in movies about mourning. Also, other than the scourge of COVID and Maya’s self-destructive habits, this is, pleasantly, a villain-less picture boosted by its luscious travelogue jaunts of location shooting and two alluring beaus in Gabriel Basso and Aaron Pierre, who bring entirely different levels of appeal to our leading woman.
Love of Your Life proves that there’s always room for a good weeper at the movies. We, as the audience, attach ourselves to figures we love quickly, and process the acceleration of missing them when they are taken away. Watching fictional proxies go through recognizable pain can help viewers reflect, consider, prepare, or push through their own, in classic “what would you do?” fashion. Maybe we’re the type to stay and not run away like Maya, but a good crusher with sweep like Love of Your Life reminds you of what you have and what is possible. As Felix chooses to remember, “This was something.”
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1437)
