|
|
|
Miss You Already
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Lions Gate Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (10th March 2016). |
|
The Film
 Jess (Firestarter's Drew Barrymore) and Milly (Muriel's Wedding's Toni Collette) have been the best of friends since the former was transplanted by her father (who we never meet) from Oregon to England. The daughter of flighty television actress Miranda (Wild Orchid's Jacqueline Bisset), Milly has been the wild child, exposing Jess to sex, drugs, and partying and facilitating her first kiss and her first time. Surprisingly, it is Milly who settles down first when she finds herself pregnant by roadie Kit (The Duchess' Dominic Cooper). Soon enough, Kit is a successful record producer, Milly in public relations, and they have two adorable kids, a stylish loft, and Miranda a doting grandmother in between increasingly less glamorous television assignments (the latest about the women in Shakespeare's life nicknamed "Shakespeare's Shags" by Milly and Jess). Jess, on the other hand, has taken a more direct approach to bettering the environment than Kit's and Milly's pseudo-Sting-and-Trudie celebrity charity galas (Trudie Styler actually is credited as one of the executive producers), and has only recently found her soulmate in oil rig worker Jago (Hot Fuzz's Paddy Considine). As Jess and Jago consider expensive IVF treatments to get pregnant, Milly has been concealing from her friend and family the discovery of a lump in her breast until it is diagnosed as a very aggressive form of breast cancer. Jess, Kit, and Miranda provide Milly with her support system as she goes through the physically-draining and painful treatments and tries to keep up a brave face for the children. Milly completes chemotherapy but her concerns over her appearance and the underlying fear of recurrence push her towards reckless, wild, and compulsive behavior that tries the patience of family and friends. When her doctors advise a double mastectomy, Milly drags Jess – who has suppressed the announcement of her own pregnancy – along one on one last adventure. Miss You Already is promoted as being "Beaches for 2015" and it aspires to little more than that, with director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) favoring kinetic montages set to an obnoxious compilation soundtrack – featuring Jane's Addiction, Moby, R.E.M., Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Paloma Faith, among others – over emotional honesty. While cancer diagnoses are more common (in life and in film/television) and increasingly relatable, they are no less devastating; and yet the film's characters strive to for tension-easing humorous quips and try to see the humor in the various stages of treatment (Jess wearing Milly's emesis bin as a hat during chemotherapy treatments) and coping (including a wig-fitting scene with some comic relief from Alice in Wonderland's Frances de la Tour) long before Milly has resolved to live in the moment. The closest Morwenna Banks's (Wide Open Spaces) semi-autobiographical script (the actress turned writer previously authored a play about losing friends to breast cancer) – or at least the celluloid iteration of it – gets to anything that feels remotely genuine is Milly's offhand remarks about how much she has invested in her vanity; not so much because she has lost her hair and is "in mourning" for her breasts, but because it expresses more so than a later scene with her husband the realization of time squandered on such minutia in the midst of what has been presented to us as an exciting life with now room for regrets. Tearjerkers are manipulative by design, but Miss You Already seems to take for granted that the audience should identify and empathize with its central duo based solely on their portrayers. Barrymore is pretty much the same she is in every movie while Collette and Bisset manage to wring some depth of roles that play like slightly more sober Ab-Fab caricatures. The men are ciphers with Cooper providing eye-candy and Considine in the sort of role that seems meant for post-Bridesmaids Chris O'Dowd. Although the film's two protagonists idolize Wuthering Heights' Heathcliffe, the cancer-stricken Milly seems an unacknowledged reference to Henry James' Wings of the Dove. Tyson Ritter, lead singer of The All American Rejects (who contributed to the film's soundtrack), appears as the hunky young bartender who provides Milly with the physical affection lacking in her husband after her double mastectomy. The production was reportedly troubled with both Jennifer Aniston (Stealing Beauty) and Rachael Weisz (Wanderlust) involved at different stages of pre-production. Forget a Beaches for a new generation and just rent Beaches. 
Video
No complaints about LionsGate's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.40:1 widescreen encode of this slickly-lensed production. 
Audio
The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track provides a clear rendering of the film's dialogue, unobtrusive sound design, and the more forceful deployment of compilation soundtrack. Optional subtitles are provided in English, English SDH, and Spanish. 
Extras
Extras commence with a gushy audio Commentary by director Catherine Hardwicke and associate producers Jeff Toye & Jamie Holt in which the director recalls her excitement about shooting in London and taking off for nine weeks of pre-production as soon as Barrymore agreed to do the film. She and her associate producers (who were by her side throughout pre-production and production) discuss the location scouting and Hardwicke's practice of having crew members stage scenes during the scouting process to explore the shooting possibilities. She discusses the elements of production design and art direction that came out of her research, and weaving her memories of a Wuthering Heights tour from an earlier visit to England throughout the screenplay. They discuss the importance of chemistry between the two lead characters, including the casting of their earlier incarnations - Game of Thrones's Charlotte Hope as teenage Jess and 's Sophie Holland as teenage Milly - and Hardwicke makes the frankest remark of the track in finding that they cast an American as young Jess because the American accents of the young British acting students who auditioned for the role were just terrible. In "With Love: Making Miss You Already" (14:31), Banks recalls how she was moved to write about the effect of breast cancer on young women and families after the disease touched several of her friends in a short period while producer Christopher Simon (I, Anna) reveals that he felt Hardwicke was the right choice for director after seeing Thirteen. Hardwicke discusses the chemistry between Collette and Barrymore - who each contribute some mutual admiration in their talking head bits - and Banks giving her permission to riff on the British sense of humor and add to it.  The music videos "The Crazy Ones" (4:18) by Paloma Faith and "There's a Place" (4:59) by The All-American Rejects are included with brief intros by the singers. On-set Selfies (0:45) takes the place of a conventional promotional stills gallery to very little interest. "A Director's Lookbook for Milly's Party" (2:36) is a captioned montage of location scouting photographs, shot lists, script pages, and ideas about the lighting and the color scheme for Milly's birthday party scene. The deleted scenes (18:50) feature optional commentary from Hardwicke whose whose rigorous planning as a director seems to have been all for naught as she comments on her how important these scenes were but that they either slowed down the film, were repetitive beats (the scene in which Milly and Kit tell their son that she is dying), or had to be sacrificed to keep the film under two hours. Most regrettably lost are two substantial scenes with Bisset which give her additional depth and a sense of self-awareness. The last one "More Fun with Jess & Milly" (4:46) is actually a series of little extensions from various scenes early on that were cut to get to the "meat" of the story (including Milly's first doctor's visit and Ace's introduction).
Overall
Forget a Beaches for a new generation and just rent Beaches. 
|
|||||
|