‘Love of Your Life’ Prime Video Review: Rachel Morrison Directs Margaret Qualley In A Romantic Drama About Heartbreak, Recovery And Second Chances

Contemporary romantic drama has hardened into just another formula, a niche, one more category on the streaming menu. Love of Your Life is and isn’t one of those movies. Put differently, it has enough distinctive touches to slip the formula, to present itself as a more personal story rather than one built around a high concept. The trouble is that those touches turn out to be less distinctive than they first appear, and Rachel Morrison’s film is not nearly as far from the formula as it thinks.

Morrison, a well-respected cinematographer, directs her second feature here after The Fire Inside, and her hand shows from the first sunset and the first lovely vista. There’s a postcard prettiness to the movie, as there is in plenty of today’s romantic dramas, but here the images are so stylized they feel closer to the melodramas of the ’50s. Within that gorgeous Boston and its surrounding towns sits a story of love, grief, second chances, crisis and recovery that is convincing in its first half and then slowly loses the force and urgency it started with.

Margaret Qualley plays Maya, an overworked nurse living in Boston in the late 2010s. While shopping for a piece of furniture to restore, she meets Charlie (Gabriel Basso), its handsome, easygoing owner. Conversation turns into an invitation, and Maya, wary at first of any romantic entanglement, not only says yes but quickly falls for him. They move in together, he introduces her to his family (Catherine Keener plays his mother), she introduces him to her best friend (Patrick Schwarzenegger), and before long they’re married and deeply in love.

Anyone who knows the rules of the genre will understand that a romance this fast and this free of conflict is bound to hit an obstacle. Without giving too much away, 2020 arrives, along with the Covid-19 pandemic, and the couple’s life changes forever. Maya falls into crisis, drops everything and heads to Europe, specifically Portugal, to figure out what comes next. From there the film follows her attempts to recover from what happened. It won’t be easy, not even with the prospect of a new romance (enter Aaron Pierre, of the recent Lanterns) or the lovely European scenery Morrison and her team lay at her feet.

Lay out the plot of Love of Your Life and you’ll find little that separates it from the many adaptations of those bestsellers that blend romance, tragedy, self-help, beautiful scenery and very good-looking actors. At a certain level, that’s exactly what it is, built from the same parts as countless interchangeable romantic films. And yet Morrison and her cast are aiming higher: to give the drama some emotional truth, to step off the predictable path and away from the easy cry. They often get there, thanks to a cast far more supple (and more grown-up) than what these movies usually offer, and to a knack for conveying that what we’re watching is, if not real, at least believable enough.

The film hits an early dramatic peak, and then its second half, set mostly in the cities and towns of Europe, drifts into a touristic, wish-fulfillment register that costs it a good chunk of the truth it had before. Toward the end, Julia Cox’s screenplay makes some strenuous attempts to win it back. A few land, mostly thanks to the actors, while others, tied much more closely to predictable mechanics, don’t.

In its favor, Love of Your Life takes the pandemic seriously, along with the denial around it and the trauma it left in so many people. At moments it shows the same seriousness in recognizing that relationships always hide complicated corners, even when everything looks beautiful and sweet. The problem with Morrison’s film is that it wants to play both sides at once: to be original and predictable, a little different but not so different that it alienates the presumed captive audience for this kind of movie. With a foot planted on each side, the film stumbles. It’s enjoyable, or perhaps painful, but it’s unlikely to stay with you.