Movie Review: 'Me Before You'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- If Me Before You does nothing else, it at least establishes the can't-miss credentials of two soon-to-be stars.
Their names, not yet familiar on the movie landscape but unmistakably on their way there, are Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin.
And the nothing else is actually something of value, at the very least what we might call a good cry.
Is Me Before You a weepie, a tearjerker, a three-hankie meller?
Well, yeah. What of it?
Written by Jojo Moyes and based on her best-selling novel of the same name, it's the story of the relationship between a quadriplegic named Will Traynor, played by Claflin, and his caretaker, Louisa "Lou" Clark, played by Emilia Clarke.
Thea Sharrock, a theater director making her directorial debut, rests her film on the shoulders of her two British leads and they reward her confidence in them with two strong performances.
Claflin is best known for his Finnick Odair in the Hunger Games movies, Clarke for her Daenerys Targaryen on television's Game of Thrones.
Both references will eventually be early entries on lengthy cinematic resumes.
As for Sharrock, she plays against the inherent sadness of the material with a light enough touch to be audience-friendly without sacrificing gravitas.
Lou, a radiant optimist if ever there were one, has just lost her job and her struggling family, headed by her unemployed father, played by Brendan Coyle (of TV's Downton Abbey), needs her to provide income.
She's hired to take care of Will, an ex-athlete who is paralyzed from the neck down as the result of a traffic accident, and he lives in a wing of the family castle, relegated to a bed and a wheelchair, along with his well-to-do parents, played by Janet McTeer and Charles Dance, who keep bringing him caretaker candidates whom he keeps scaring away.
She's happy to be making a salary, but his obstinacy and depression and unpleasantness make her want to quit almost immediately.
However, given her family's financial worries, she remains on the job and, as relentlessly chipper as she is – you can literally hear her smile, recalling Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky -- she takes on the persona of truth-teller, perhaps the only one in Will's life.
She is aware through all this of Will's understandable suicidal tendencies, given his pain, discomfort, resentment, prospects, and the inevitability of things getting even worse.
But even as their feelings for each other change and inevitably deepen -- to the chagrin of Lou's jealous boyfriend, a running enthusiast played by Matthew Lewisd – Will cannot help wishing that he was, as the title suggests, the person he was before she showed up.
His perceptions and observations recall much of the Richard Dreyfuss film, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, and it is this quality-of-life theme that undoubtedly was part of the inspiration for author Moyes to address the topic in the first place.
Director Sharrock somehow manages to make the film simultaneously downbeat and uplifting, not an easy task. She could be accused, I suppose, of soft-pedaling Will's physical condition and suffering, but it's an understandable compromise in an "entertainment," and her film surely earns its tears nonetheless.
Ultimately, Me Before You is about caring and caring for, and we respond to its rhythms and charms because we respond to the central characters, played with a sincere sparkle by Clarke and nuanced understatement by Claflin.
So we'll care for 3 stars out of 4. Feel free to clap for Clarke and Claflin and cling to those kleenex.
