THE STORY – After a perfect outing with her boyfriend, Kenna makes an unbearable mistake that sends her to prison for seven years. Hoping to rebuild her life after her release, she tries to reunite with her daughter, but her custodial grandparents refuse to let Kenna see her. She soon finds unexpected compassion from a local bar owner as their secret romance gives Kenna hope for a second chance.
THE CAST – Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Rudy Pankow, Lainey Wilson, Lauren Graham & Bradley Whitford
THE TEAM – Vanessa Caswill (Director), Colleen Hoover (Writer) & Lauren Levine (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 114 Minutes
The Colleen Hoover adaptations just keep coming. With three major-studio film adaptations of her bestselling books in as many years, Hoover is fast becoming this generation’s Nicholas Sparks, a genuine crossover phenomenon the likes of which we don’t see very often. The quality of the writing doesn’t matter; Hoover, like Sparks before her, writes melodramatic stories of simple people in complex situations who pull through on the strength of their hard-won moral righteousness. Her stories are about people who just can’t stop doing the wrong thing because it feels so damn right, and who doesn’t want to find out that the thing they did that everyone told them was bad was really good, actually? These morality tales may be twisted in knots. Still, they’re all united by the end, reinforcing the heteronormative family unit as the final thing that even the most broken people need to find true happiness.
“Reminders of Him,” the latest Hoover adaptation, is pretty easily the best film of her work yet, mostly because it lacks the campiest elements of “It Ends With Us” and “Regretting You” while focusing on keeping the story as grounded as possible. A good thing, since this is a story of a young woman, Kenna (Maika Monroe), returning to her hometown after a stint in prison doing time for the car accident that killed her boyfriend, Scotty (Rudy Pankow), trying to scrape together enough money and dignity to see her daughter, who has been living with Scotty’s parents (Bradley Whitford and Lauren Graham). However, many Hoover-isms abound, from the unbelievable names for Kenna’s daughter (Diem) and love interest (Ledger), to the fact that said love interest (Tyriq Withers) is her dead ex’s best friend, who never met Kenna because he was playing professional football for the Denver Broncos while she and Scotty were together.
Thankfully, director Vanessa Caswill and her cast treat the melodrama seriously, never treating the material as beneath them. While this seriousness leads to the film dragging for long stretches, there’s enough comic relief that the film itself never becomes a drag. Indeed, the plodding pacing is the worst thing one can say about Caswill’s direction, which is as generically slick as you would expect from a major-studio romance novel adaptation. She relies too much on needle drops, for example, but that’s just what you do in this kind of movie. It’s hard to fault her when she treats the material with this much respect, especially when the most obviously manipulative touches clearly come from the source material, most notably the use of adorable children as emotional shortcuts and the withholding of the truth of the fatal accident.
Despite some questionable writing, you have to admit that Hoover knows how to write a good meet-cute, and she gives us two adorable ones here, with both Scotty and Ledger. It helps that Monroe, Pankow, and Withers are all incredibly beautiful, charismatic people, of course. Still, Scotty buying one plate at the dollar store where Kenna works just to talk to her and immediately returning it so that he can ask her out is impossibly charming, as is Ledger’s attempt at making a fancy coffee drink at his bar for Kenna, who thought it was still her and Scotty’s favorite bookshop. Ledger wonders aloud at one point if Kenna is the saddest girl he’s ever met, and Monroe does strong work portraying that sadness as undergirding every other emotion she feels, even happiness. Her despair at losing both Scotty, to whom she still writes letters, and her daughter, whom she never even got to hold as a newborn, is the only constant Kenna has in her life, and Monroe plays her as holding onto it with every fiber of her being, her one connection to the biggest loves of her life. We never learn about Kenna’s life before Scotty, but Monroe gives us all we need to know in her performance. Withers also does decent work as a man who doesn’t want to lose anything more in his life after losing both his best friend and football in quick succession, clinging to Scotty’s family out of a misplaced sense of duty for not being there when Scotty died. While Graham and Whitford’s casting feels out of place, Graham at least makes the most of it, nailing the last act’s two most important emotional moments in a way that makes the whole ordeal worth it.
Yes, “Reminders of Him” is very much an ordeal, but not so much because it’s bad. It’s an ordeal because of all the emotional muck these characters have to drag themselves through to get to the other side. Life is hard, more so when you’re fresh out of prison with no support system, and even more so when you have to raise your child’s daughter because he was killed in a car crash before she was born. Nothing is easy in Colleen Hoover’s world, except for love, which is always right even when it’s wrong (except when it’s not; I’m looking at you, “It Ends With Us”). That can make her characters feel weirdly devoid of empathy for anyone other than themselves, but watching them open up to others does feel good, and watching stories that have empathy for the less fortunate (even if their characters don’t) does, too. It’s hard to call “Reminders of Him” a feel-good movie, but I did walk out of it feeling good. I felt good because I had finally watched a Colleen Hoover adaptation that didn’t make me reconsider all of my life choices, but considering how woebegone the previous ones were, I’ll take it.
