A more cynical person would describe Me Before You as a movie in which a woman is paid to spend time with a man, and eventually they develop feelings for each other, but romance doesn’t trump selfishness. That’s kind of a dark way to look at it, but Me Before You is such a vanilla movie, which such little genuine emotional impact, that you’re almost forced into considering different ways of looking at the film.
Otherwise, Me
Before You will just dissolve into the recesses of your brain, only to
reappear whenever you see Emilia Clarke do something crazy with her eyebrows on
Game of Thrones or when Sam Claflin
flashes his disgustingly attractive smile in a Hunger Games prequel or something. It’s not that Me Before You is bad, but it’s such a
product of our modern idea of romance—shaped by the likes of Nicholas Sparks
and Fifty Shades of Grey, with the
presentation of male dominance as heartwarming affection—that it’s almost
exhausting to watch.
The film focuses on the relationship between Will Traynor
(Claflin) and Lou Clark (Clarke), which begins as a working arrangement. After
Will—once gorgeous, athletic, and super-successful—is paralyzed due to a
traffic accident, he recedes from the world, spending two years holed up in his
family’s palatial estate. (They literally
own a castle, so.) Desperate to find someone who lifts their son’s spirits,
Will’s parents hire Lou to be his companion.
She’s a little bit of a mess—showing up to the interview in
a miniskirt that promptly tears, totally unaware of Will’s quadriplegic status,
and thoroughly useless at anything but making a cup of tea—but she captures
Will’s parents’ attention. It’s not easy going at first, not with Will refusing
to speak to Lou, but when he learns she’s never seen a movie with subtitles—because
she’s such an uncouth working-class rube, duhhh—he
suddenly develops an interest in helping her “widen your horizons.”
So he teaches her about pesto sauce, which she calls “green
gravy.” He teaches her about horse-racing. He teaches her about Paris, and about
classical music, and about his family history (they do, in fact, visit the
castle that separates his estate from her working-class side of town), and he
learns about her interest in fashion and why she didn’t attend college. On her
end, she learns more about his spinal cord injury, about his up-and-down
health, and about the accident that caused his paralysis.
As they become friends, Will’s parents are pleased (is
she teaching him to live?), but Lou’s boyfriend Patrick (Matthew Lewis) is
unnerved. What are Will and Lou, really? And what does their relationship mean
for both of their futures?
It’s hard to fault either Clarke or Claflin for the
frustrating elements of Me Before You,
because they’re so goddamn likable and charming. In her parade of ridiculous
outfits (did the British shoe brand Irregular Choice provide all of Lou’s
footwear?), Clarke is an adorable sight, and her smile overwhelms her whole
face. It’s immediately obvious why her cheeriness would be infectious. And
Claflin, who captured so many hearts as the disgustingly handsome, witty
Finnick in The Hunger Games series,
is gorgeous here, too. All the teenage girls in the row next to me couldn’t get
enough!
But their solid performances don’t balance out the problematic
parts of Me Before You, which are
many. The uneven power dynamic in Will and Lou’s relationship, in which the
wealthy, sophisticated man is teaching the blue-collar, naïve girl all about
life. She doesn’t know anything until she meets him, of course, and she only
wants more from her life thanks to his influence. The idea that Will’s life now
isn’t worth continuing, even though he has people who love and support him. And
the assumption that we, as viewers, will understand that Lou is being given a
better life when—spoiler alert!—Will pushes her away.
You’ve seen all these elements before, in all of Sparks’s
happy-white-Southerners novels and film adaptations, and in Fifty Shades of Grey, in which money
and submission equal happiness, and in countless other tales of modern-day
romance. Those kinds of fantasies are what Me
Before You is trying to emulate, and they’re just as reductive and sexist
here as they were there.
Rating:
2.5 out of 5 Guttenbergs
