Love of Your Life
After Tragedy Other Difficulties Remain
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I will call either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to ongoing COVID-19 concerns on my part I’m focusing on streaming these days with limited visits to theaters. (Note: Anything here in bold blue [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or in the review.) This blog’s been operational since mid-December 2011, often with ridiculously-long reviews from me, but other ongoing responsibilities now require me to be very brief in order to have time to post anything each week, although I’ll include links to informative sites for useful enhancement.
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.
Here’s the trailer:
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Love of Your Life is a romantic drama, emphasis on that phrase’s first word in its early going followed by a shift to the second word as the plot unfolds. We follow the life of current/then former Boston ER nurse Maya (Margaret Qualley) over 11 years as she happens upon Charlie (Gabriel Basso) with whom she has an instant connection (he also easily becomes a “best bud” with Jason [Patrick Schwarzenegger], Maya’s platonic friend from their college years) so they soon marry where Maya finds great comfort with her mother-in-law, Ruth (Catherine Keener). Yet, in case you’d think all of this idyllic love will just continue for the near-2 hour-running time you’re suddenly slapped back to reality when Charlie contracts COVID-19 and dies (not truly a Spoiler because it comes so relatively early in this narrative). Heartbroken Maya shuts herself from everything and everyone—including Ruth—as much as possible as her grief is enormously deep. Three years later we find her in Lisbon, Portugal (a place she and Charlie often talked of visiting) where she supports herself with a telehealth job, attempts to drown her ongoing sorrows with lots of drinking and one-night stands until she once again happens upon a fulfilling encounter with Felix (Aaron Pierre), a divorcé from London. They fall into a passionate romance with a seaside trip, then on to London for both of them. At a restaurant one night, though, Felix happens upon them, wants to fully catch up with Maya, but she acts as if they’re just casual acquaintances which angers him greatly (later we learn she didn’t want to reveal a lot of her past to Felix which gives us reason to wonder what she truly hoped to share in a relationship with him). There’s quite a bit more to Maya’s story; however, my arbitrary choice of space for these postings leads me to refer you to this site to find more (lots of useful details, Spoilers as well). You might be hesitant to see it if you’ve had any bad COVID experience (I lost a long-time friend) or you might not support some of Maya’s decisions, but if you can get past such hindrances I think you’d find a lot to appreciate about all these human depictions.
Love of Your Life was released to “select theaters” on October 7, 2026 (which means no report on box-office revenues) but is more easily found via streaming where it’s free on Amazon Prime Video (if you’re a subscriber or just want to take advantage of their 30-day no-charge policy, after which you could remain for $8.99 monthly), I found this to be an engaging story as did the overall CCAL where Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews are at 81% while the Metacritic average score is lower (as usual) at 62%. Among those who join me in recommending is my local guy in the San Francisco Bay Area, Randy Myers (3 of 4 stars), in The San Jose Mercury News: (scroll down to his third review here) “Romantic dramas that focus intricately and sensitively with weighty matters such as moving on from a tragic event don’t get produced as often as they once did. […] filmmaker Rachel Morrison successfully fills that void with a soulful character study […] Qualley and screenwriter Julia Cox (‘Nyad’) make Maya a brittle, fully realized character with brains and issues. […] this film succeeds because of Qualley’s mercurial and tone-rich performance, the gorgeous cinematography from Todd Banhazl and a nuanced protagonist confronting both exterior and interior hardships.”
Of course, those critic-compilation totals include negative responses as with Jourdain Searles (MC 40) of The Hollywood Reporter: “Maya insists that Charlie was the special one, the one who made life easy and fun. But she seems to float through the world as a beautiful damsel who tries to disappear but can’t seem to avoid being the center of attention. […] Maya’s fear of commitment mirrors the film’s fear of showing us anything truly ugly or grappling with the idea that our heroine is one of many, many people who lost someone during a society-shattering number of years.” Obviously, I'm more with the supporters (even as the story’s resolution evokes ambiguity), but I’ll leave the watching choice to you. My choice for a closing Musical Metaphor focuses on Maya’s situation of somehow remaining connected to Charlie so I give you Bob Dylan’s early tune "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" (dates from 1963; found on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II [1971]) where she’d also say “But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty / That I remember in my true love’s eyes” (even as you must change gender references in the song from female to male).
(In this photo Pat on left, Ken on right.) If you’d like to know more about the Two Guys “wisdom” in this blog you can go here for links to our past reviews, our homepage, our Facebook page, sign-up for a Google account to reply to us, & Ken Burke’s email address if you want direct correspondence.
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