By Jason Osiason
Love of Your Life is a ridiculously elevated Nicholas Sparks tragi-romance set during COVID and I mean that as a compliment, the kind of compliment that only sounds like an insult if you’ve never actually sat through a Nicholas Sparks movie and wished somebody good had made it. Somebody good made this one. The material is as sentimental as it gets and the people behind it hold back almost everything, which is the whole trick, and Rachel Morrison was a cinematographer before she was a director, she shot Mudbound, so every frame swoons with tenderness while refusing to tell you when to cry.
Maya is an ER nurse, played by Margaret Qualley, who doesn’t do the big love thing and has her reasons. Charlie, played by Gabriel Basso, walks into her by accident and within a week her whole philosophy is in the trash. Chemistry between the two of them off the charts, the kind where I’d happily watch them sit in a parked car not talking. The camera is in love with them. So is the light. It gets almost embarrassing and I never once cared. Then 2020 arrives and she’s a nurse and you already know, the title told you before the lights went down, and the movie knows you know and goes ahead anyway. That’s the part that had me gushing. No speeches. Strings never swell on cue. It lets them be happy for as long as it can stand to, takes it away, and barely moves the camera doing it.
Qualley fans, this is your feast. Gorgeous performance, probably her best, she has never been this open on a screen. There’s a scene in the first half where all she does is listen to him talk and it’s more than most actors manage with a monologue. Basso is the surprise. Four scenes in and you understand why she’d blow everything up for this guy.
Then the after. The last forty minutes or so have Maya leaving her life, finding a new man, Felix, played by Aaron Pierre, moving to a new country, doing every single thing a person does to avoid feeling the thing. The movie runs out of steam here. It doesn’t fall apart, it just starts reaching for the familiar answers to grief, travel, the new guy, a lesson at the end, the same answers every one of these movies ends up reaching for, and after an hour of a film that wouldn’t take the easy road anywhere, taking it here stings a little. Still beautiful to look at. The surprise is gone though.
When it’s good, and it’s good for a long stretch, it left my heart swollen. The first hour is proof the weepie is a real genre with real craft hiding in it. The only thing wrong with most of them is nobody holds anything back.
