The mainstream romantic drama matters. Movies on the artier end of the spectrum — Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Phantom Thread — have endured and (rather quickly) entered the canon. But for every Before Trilogy there’s also an About Time, which tells us just as much, if not more, about the time in which it was made. The plainspoken stuff may land with the same force as the masterpieces, but even Henery Hawk deserves a little love: getting romantic melodrama right is no easy task.
In this respect, Colleen Hoover’s track record has been spotty. She’s the latest novelist to be swallowed up by the Hollywood machine in their perpetual mad rush to exploit the success of a writer’s work (look out for Michael Showalter’s Verity this fall), and following 2024’s batshit insane It Ends With Us — a hothouse trashterpiece bolstered by the wacky and litigious falling-out between its star and director —and last year’s DOA Regretting You, Hoover is foisted on us yet again with Reminders of Him, the first of her film adaptations to feature her as co-screenwriter.
Upon first glance, it’s pure Hooverian schlock: an ex-con, Kenna, meets-cute with the owner of the local watering hole, Ledger, after she returns to Laramie, Wyoming, to get back on her feet following time served for accidentally killing her boyfriend Scotty in a car wreck seven years prior. The budding relationship between girl and boy is then complicated by the knowledge of Scotty’s death and Ledger’s fealty to Scotty’s parents, who have been entrusted with the custody of Kenna’s daughter Diem.
Remarkably, however, Reminders of Him is a pleasant affair. It unfolds with a confident breeziness and an unassuming winsome attitude. Sure, there are plenty of moments shaped in the TJ Maxx “we may not have it together, but together we have it all” coffee mug mold, and there’s a lazy structural gimmick that thrusts us into diaphanous flashbacks straight out of ’90s broadcast TV, but director Vanessa Caswill also builds a romance that’s actually charged with desire and fills the edges of that romance with Laramie’s vibrant local color (really Alberta, Canada, in a clever act of movie location cheating reminiscent of Brokeback Mountain), cooling Hoover’s outrageous narrative instincts and zeroing in on the town’s working-class milieu. Kenna works days bagging groceries at a supermarket and nights at the bar Ledger owns, and the film tactfully cuts away to ancillary characters so we get a good feel for the community (quite unlike the desolate could-be-anywhere Boston of It Ends with Us).
Caswill’s direction is itself a perfect example of her orientation toward her characters: sturdy and dependable. She directs with a levelheaded resolve and uses the tools of the trade (and here filmmaking truly is a trade) in subtly effective ways. The use of handheld is tasteful, short playful interludes both illustrate character and drive the story forward, and there’s a oner that genuinely fulfills the promise of the technique: in an early scene, Kenna goes to visit Diem, but Diem’s grandparents won’t let her inside the house. Caswill holds on Kenna as she’s dragged across the street and into Ledger’s house, and only breaks the shot when Kenna makes a run for it back to Diem. This kind of quietly muscular filmmaking feels like a lost art in the age of auteur-or-bust, and it taps into a 2020s Americana from which most other contemporary American movies either recoil out of disgust or lean into with a Christian nationalist agenda. Reminders of Him is not great, but it follows a great imperative: to reclaim middle America for the people who just want to see its landscape used as the background for a competent story told on-screen.
One of the film’s final images is of a pigeon flying over the Wyoming skyline — for an asinine reason, don’t ask — and it’s the perfect metaphor for the movie that precedes it: an unremarkable creature flying with grand peaks far away in the distance. Reminders of Him never pops, but it chugs right along and (mostly) resists the obnoxious and the cloying. Like that pigeon, it doesn’t reach any soaring heights, but it ain’t aiming for them, either. It’s going straight for those tasty bits of hot dog left on the side of the road.
DIRECTOR: Vanessa Caswill; CAST: Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Rudy Pankow, Lainey Wilson, Lauren Graham; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: March 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 54 min.
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