For me, romantic comedies as earnest as Me Before You have to do one thing. If I go “Aww” more than I laugh, the movie is a success. Me Before You bats .500, so it falls right in the middle. For you romantics, this movie is agressively adorable, and for partners to those romantics, well, at least you know your partner will be in the mood for…stuff.
Will Traynor (Sam Claflin, Finnick from the Hunger Games) is a very successful buisinessman with a very beautiful wife and a zest for living….until he gets paralyzed by a motorcycle. The guy wallows in misery for a while; that is, until Louisa ‘Lou’ Clark (Emilia Clarke, mother of dragons) shows up. Lou is hired by Will’s parents (Janet McTeer and Charles Dance) to brighten Will’s life a bit. As the inevitable barriers soften between Will and Lou, Lou tries to bring him back pieces of his old life in this new way, to get Will to try to move on. However, Will’s idea of moving on isn’t an easy nut to crack.
The cryptic paragraph above is a SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!! Will’s idea of moving on is doctor assisted suicide. Shockingly, Me Before You is very adult about the subject in the context of a sappy romantic comedy. Many movies like this would have Lou inevitably change Will’s mind, but Me Before You (probably because JoJo Moyes, the author, adapted it) treats that tough decision with respect. While others don’t understand, others are not Will, and as we learn more about the guy, we learn how much his current condition hampers his zeal for life. Like Rain Man, the change has to be born by Lou, because Will is unchanging, a very complicated mess of emotions the movie handles pretty ok.
The biggest problem with Me Before You is it tantalizes with character building and falls back on schmaltzy crap. The movie sets up how competitive and thrill seeking Will is pretty obviously, and they use that personality trait exactly once, at Lou’s birthday. Watching Will try to best Lou’s pointless boyfriend of 7(????) years Patrick (Harry Potter’s Matthew Lewis) in speech, or gifts, gives the scene a momentum that screeches to a halt so the movie can remind us that Will and Lou are FALLING IN LOVE, YAY!!!!! Were Lou’s character to plan more activities in the third act to engage Will’s thrill-seeking the movie would have earned my respect and made me aww during the tear jerking moments. It’s not good when Lou’s grandpa who gets no words and is in one scene gets me closer to tears than the two main characters.
Another frustrating thing is, I really think Claflin and Clarke have real shots at being in romantic comedies for a while. Clarke gets to show her effervescence in Me Before You, nagging the camera with Zoey Deschanel levels of dorkability. With better direction, Clarke can put that skill to better use. Claflin does admirably with only facial movement as his asset. He’s got that devilish smile that will win hearts over easily, or the looks to play the bad guy in the next romcom (though his personality isn’t as engaging as Clarke’s). Everyone else is mostly background filler, with few scenes to be more than one note characters. I will say, I rooted most for Nathan (Stephen Peacocke), the guy in the thankless male-nurse-who-lifts-Will’s-body role so Lou can swoop in and save the day.
Me Before You is 90% fantasy, 10% unformed plot. The jaded will laugh. The earnest will cry. The manic pixie dream girls will follow Emilia Clarke around, asking for fashion tips. For me, I will think of the thankless Nathan, and how the story at least gave him a resolution that befitted his important role that no one noticed.