Something I asked myself while watching Me Before You, a winning film adaptation of the best-selling tearjerker novel, was a question I should probably ask myself more often: Would I be as charmed by this if they weren’t British?
It’s a hard one to answer definitively, but I suspect there might be something to my theory that, say, the whimsy of Love Actually, or the melancholy of About Time, or indeed the sweet sorrow of Me Before You, wouldn’t be quite as effective if the characters had flat American accents and lived in Cleveland. Which means I, and you, should take the gradually won affection I felt for Me Before You—a true weepy about the enriching, tragic love between a quirky commoner (Emilia Clarke) and the dashing, posh fellow (Sam Claflin) she goes to work for after an accident puts him in a wheelchair—with a grain of good old American salt.
To be fair to this pleasant and sad little movie, it does possess wit and style that likely transcend any accent. Jojo Moyes adapted her own novel, and though I’m told it excises a rather significant plot point/character detail, the script has a warm, gracious humanity to it. Though they're certainly representative of well-worn types, our young lovers, Will and Lou, actually feel like people, too. The film was directed by Thea Sharrock, a newcomer to film after getting a prodigy-like start in the theater (named artistic director of a major London theater at 24, directed Daniel Radcliffe in the hit Broadway-transferring production of Equus at 31)—and watching the movie, it’s apparent that there’s a thinking person behind the camera. The film, though shot in rich, saturated colors by Remi Adefarasin (he filmed Elizabeth back in 1998), has a nice sense of economy. It’s emotive, but it’s also efficient, telling an inevitable story (Will is prickly and mean at first, but he softens as Lou teaches him to love again while he shows Lou all of her unrealized potential) with a swift, confident freshness. Yes we’ve seen this kind of thing many times already, but Me Before You has makes a gentle case for doing it all over again.
The casting certainly helps. Clarke is obviously best known as the anointed, possibly megalomaniacal dragon queen Daenerys on Game of Thrones, while Claflin is probably most famous for playing trident-wielding sexpot Finnick in the Hunger Games movies. Here we get to see their softer, more sensitive sides, and though both actors have their problems—Claflin’s charm can be a bit mechanical, Clarke has a habit of overplaying her character’s guileless goodness, cutely knitted brows and all—but, boy, do they have chemistry together. Theirs is a dewy, wet-eyed rapport that could easily have been noxious and sugary. Instead, it’s mostly reined in by Sharrock and her actors, just before it crosses that treacly line. (Not always, though. Among other sins committed, in a few instances the film relies on that grotesque movie trope of lovestruck dopes referring to each other by their first and last names. No one does this in real life!) Sharrock also hired a strong coterie of supporting players to round out the film, including the great Janet McTeer and Charles Dance as Will’s caring parents, and promising up-and-comer Vanessa Kirby as an old girlfriend.
But, at the risk of spoiling things, where the movie is at its most impressive and assured is when it’s grappling—in an admirably frank manner for a movie like this—with the topic of assisted suicide. The film approaches this thorny issue with an honorable maturity and forthrightness, even if it’s all given the glowing gloss of an Instagram snap with the filter put up to the hilt. That, to me, represents something intrinsically, crucially British about the film, a pragmatic, a-religious approach that I can’t really imagine a mainstream, commercial American film taking. Though, who knows. The needle on that issue seems to have moved toward a more common acceptance, so maybe I’m once again blinded by my Anglophilia. Whatever it is, I’m glad that Me Before You doesn’t shy away from the difficulty at its center, while still giving us something cozy and romantic—and, in its own weird way, aspirational.
This is all to say, I cried at the end. Which is, of course, the whole point. Sharrack picks the perfect wistful final shot, Craig Armstrong’s score swells with ache and possibility, and everything is bathed in the golden light of bittersweet resolve. It’s potent stuff. I walked out of a screening on a drizzly May afternoon feeling just the right mix of heartened and sad, convinced of life’s fleeting beauty and longing for my own grand love affair. I also wanted to immediately head to the airport and get on a plane bound for England, even if life over there isn’t really as winsome, as warm and clever, as it so often seems up there on the shimmering screen.
