Review: “The Vow”

The Vow is a story about love triumphing in the most dire of circumstances, and by all rights it should be deeply moving.

Movies with that kind of theme always are right? Well, they should be.

Taken at face value, The Vow hits the bills perfectly. It is a heart warming story of a man, Leo (Channing Tatum) who keeps loving his wife, Piage (Rachel McAdams) and trying to rebuild their relationship even after she loses all memory of their life together through traumatic head injuries suffered in an horrific car accident.

She regresses back to the person she was years earlier, to a time when she was close to her parents (Sam O’Neill and Jessica Lange), studying law, and engaged to a different kind of man altogether. She appears at first to be nothing like the woman he married – the free spirited, bohemian  artist who created beautiful sculptures in her studio with music loud enough to deafen whole villages playing all around her.

But he persists way beyond when other mere mortals would have given up, only relinquishing his quest to make her fall in love with him again when it becomes painfully clear she won’t, or can’t reciprocate his tenacity and ardour.

So far, so moving and as far as that goes, it is a lovely movie. The start of the movie, where their courtship and marriage, and the car accident are intertwined to great effect, is touching and paints a picture of a couple very much in love. You are drawn into their wonderful rich life together, and are almost as heartbroken as Leo when it all comes tumbling down one snowy Wintry night when a truck fails to see them stopped at an intersection.

But beyond that, it loses something. Leo and Paige don’t stop being engaging, and even though Paige’s parents, who are painted with the “bad guys” brush early on, are revealed to be nuanced characters motivated simply by the need to have their daughter close to them again. So we’re not dealing with unlikable, cardboard cut out characters, and while it’s a romantic comedy of sorts, it somehow manages to flesh out a story that is as believable as these types of movies get.

And yet, it seems to get trapped in the abyss between being a goofy romantic comedy-esque movie, complete with the stalwart quirky friends – Leo and Paige get married in an art gallery without permission, and have to run with their friends from security guards – and a dramatic movie grappling with the loss of identity, both for Paige directly and Leo indirectly as Paige’s loss of self leads to his loving bond with his wife unravelling.

The dramatic element I think loses out to the romantic comedic elements. This is not to say that Leo’s pain over Paige’s rejection of him , or that her trauma over her memory loss, isn’t deeply affecting. It is, and you ache for what they have both lost, and are overjoyed when the first glimmers of a life together post this awful event comes through the black haze of grieving their lost former life.

But by trying to be all things to all people, and balance these two competing elements, the movie loses the impact of both strands. Which is a pity because it is, at heart, a very moving story.