If you're disabled, it certainly helps to be as indecently rich as you are handsome while you make plans to end your life: that, in short, is the preposterous take-away message from Me Before You, the film version of the Jojo Moyes bestseller which Moyes herself has adapted for the screen. I haven't read the book and would imagine that the material's multiple irritations, both large-scale and small, might be somewhat more tolerable not blown up into celluloid dimensions.
But as brought to the screen by OIivier Award-winning theatre director Thea Sharrock, who has spent her stage career trafficking (mostly) in the kinds of nuance and shading that are entirely absent here, the film makes such comparable weepies like The Fault in Our Stars look by comparison like Citizen Kane.
It's hard to know which get under the skin more – the near-ceaseless and specific exhortations on the order of "just live well, just live" (this from a man who has opted for the precise opposite) or the overall impression that disability is being used for cheap and easy dramatic effect, without the slightest interest in the reality of the situation. I mean, where's Ken Loach when you really need him? (Short answer: here.)
Will (Sam Claflin, giving a considerably better performance than the part deserves) is a London high-flyer whose glamorous life is upended by an accident that renders him immobile from the neck down. Cue his return to the capacious family manse up north presided over by a sotto voce Janet McTeer, whose own chilly-seeming marriage to Charles Dance suggests an entirely separate film waiting in the wings. (Dance and McTeer, pictured above).
Will has a companion (an amiable Stephen Peacocke) to tend to the messy bits – to precisely the quotidian details in which the film's creators express no interest. What's missing, or so mum decides, is some human spark that might kick-start the in-drawn, understandably rancorous Will into a renewed emotional life. And so what if that person has zero experience or qualifications for the job?
At which point, cue the arrival of local girl Louisa, aka Lou (Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke), playing a modern-day version of the cutesy dingbat that could be described as a kindred spirit to Annie Hall, except that the comic icon created by an Oscar-winning Diane Keaton would, I imagine, actually have some idea what pesto was and wouldn't balk at subtitled films as a fate worse than death. (Is there a Dignitas centre somewhere for the linguistically phobic?)
Acting nonstop with her eyebrows and a perkiness that quickly grates, Clarke's determinedly sunny Lou makes no actual sense as a character, especially once the slow-aborning couple's pricklier exchanges – "you don't have to be an ass," she announces to Will in the nearest she gets to self-defense – finds them instead sharing a bed. The twist, inasmuch as there is one, is that Lou's presence as a putative life force isn't ultimately enough to keep Will from his determination to end it all abroad. It's the patient who is here seen urging his carer to seize the day – though presumably not carpe diem, since Lou on this evidence would have no idea what that phrase means. (Clarke pictured above with Jenna Coleman as her sister).
Much has been made in the press of activists within the disabled community rightly questioning the assumption proffered here and elsewhere that early death is the preferred way out, to which I would take additional umbrage at the sense imparted by Moyes of money and looks offering an (unspoken, admittedly) panacea all their own. Quite what the real-life Wills of the world are supposed to do who don't possess Claflin's killer cheekbones and daddy's sizeable income is beside the point. Me Before You may appear as if it occupies the here and now, but with the summer film onslaught not yet upon us, this movie will surely stand as the season's most abiding fantasy of all.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Me Before You
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