The Book of Love

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Henry Herschel (Jason Sudeikis) is a by-the-book architect in New Orleans. His pregnant wife Penny (Jessica Biel) is intrigued with neighborhood kid Millie Pearlman (Maisie Williams). She makes him promise to help her despite his reluctance. Penny dies in a car crash. Millie is an orphan living with her uncaring uncle collecting junk to build a raft to sail across the Atlantic. The funeral is when the movie starts going off its tracks. Everybody is trying to be quirky while Henry is a sad sack in a depressing funeral. The tones are clashing so hard. The sad death is never far away which makes all the quirkiness rather tone deaf. Making Penny pregnant only adds to that dichotomy. Then enters Maisie Williams who is determined to test out her accent work. She's not the only one. It quickly becomes a rolling mess of incongruous parts as Henry works through the stages of grief. If the movie could strip away some of the more annoying parts, the two leads could work as a heart warming duo although they can get boring. BTW, that boat ain't making it.

This was a good movie. I deeply felt the emotions the director and actors were channeling. The characters portrayed were authentic and bare and seemed like real people...much unlike the perpetually cynical professional critics who cant enjoy a movie and shouldnt be reviewing anything but tbemselves. Maisie did a great job and her accent was well done...Jason is a talented dramatic actor. I was previously unaware of this side of him since I am more familiar with his comedic roles.

The is movie about two strangers who have been left behind by the most significant person in their lives, and about how this bonds them as they engage in a bold project to sail from New Orleans to the Azores on a homemade raft. Much of the wisdom is communicated by the voice-over commentary of 16 year-old Millie (Maisie Williams) who sounds like a deep south version of Christina Ricci's character in "The Opposite of Sex". The film is a little clumsy and Millie's accent is unnecessarily over-the-top but it is a good message and an overall pleasing effort. Most profound is Millie's ambiguous statement about people dying when nobody is looking and living while nobody is watching. By which she is expounding on both their bold but by design unobserved rafting effort and on the human condition where many lives are lived without making a ripple in the fabric of society. And perhaps a third meaning, that the cool kids are so caught up in their clique that they have defined and made a cursory dismissal of everyone, blissfully unaware that awesome things are happening all around them. There is a particularly interesting image early in the film, a shopping cart tipped over at the water's edge with a helium balloon trapped inside the inverted basket. Again this has lots of meanings, free spirit Penny trapped in the twisted metal of her wrecked car and unable to soar, Henry trapped by his grief, and Millie trapped by her defenses and unable to connect with anyone. Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

It was totally surprising just how great this movie is. I watched and now I want the movie. Outstanding performances Jason, Maise, and Jessica.

I chanced upon The Book of Love while channel-switching, saw Maisie Williams, looked for the repeat and watched it. I very nearly didn't because the synopsis made it look like a Hallmark production (bereaved architect heals himself by helping troubled teenager build a raft to sail round the world) but I thought, "What the hell, it's Arya" and watched it. I'm glad I did, because although it contains a slew of "heartwarming" clichés, it plays around with them in a very quirky way, to the extent that it's almost but not quite a satire on the genre. But there's more than playing around with clichés: the relationship between the two main characters is lovely, and there are some thought-provoking moments, though it's easy to skip over them.

Seems someone wanted to write/make a semi -serious movie about love and death - compete with To Kill A Mocking Bird type profound voice over. Just one problem, the profoundness first suggested - falls apart and gives way to foolish situations. The main character roles were more annoying than thoughtful & the whole thing leads to an even sillier ending. Some OK touches along the way get lost in superficial writing and overall, it feels like the movie makers may have been afraid of appearing 'sensitive' - so, attempted to play it in off-the-wall -mod-teenybopper mode. This approach was doomed because of the overall serious nature of the main plot. The end result; handfuls may go along with it but, very few. Minor Justin Timberlake score (the producers hubby) ads a little interest.

Two reasons for 2 stars instead of 1: 1. Jessica Biel appears in it (not stars in it, otherwise it would get 3-4 stars) 2. 1 star is reserved for truly stupid films. Oh, wait. This IS a truly stupid film, so Jessica Biel is the only reason it's got 2 stars. I don't want to reveal any plot lines, even though it's difficult to see how this terrible movie could be spoiled any more rankly. The only explanation for this monstrous work of cinematic bathos I can conjure up is that, one night, two (or more) hack script-writers got stoned with extreme prejudice and set to work on a bet that they could produce - in one night - the worst and sappiest collection of unlikely plot-lines ever devised by even semi-human minds, yet fill their to the brim with asinine emotional conceits which could tug mightily at the heart-strings of the most gullible of tear-jerk junkies. Part of the bet had to have been that no re-writes were to be done, and it's quite apparent that none were even contemplated. Perhaps the worst thing about the film is that the story inhabits neither reality nor fantasy, but rather a two-dimensional world fabricated entirely of artificial notions of what it would be like to be alive. Verisimilitude was literally ejected forcibly from the movie at scene 1, take 1, never to be allowed back into the studio.