Love of Your Life

It is sentimental, yes, and some may say too much so. But it is deeply felt and profoundly insightful, honestly performed and, in its critical moments, genuinely moving. More than that, it understands something essential about grief and love: that neither ever really leave us, and that surviving their coexistence is one of the hardest, most human things we can be asked to do.

In a way, Love of Your Life is a character study of a monster, except that Qualley and Morrison refuse to make it that simple, or to give up hope as fully as Maya sometimes seems to have done. It feels schizophrenic at times, enamored of joyous moments but undercutting the pleasure with pain. But it also suggests that there’s a reason for the film, and the life it depicts, to feel scattered: Grief is a complex thing, and you have to deal with whatever it throws at you.

Rachel Morrison’s Love of Your Life is one of my favorite things, all too rare in today’s Hollywood: A gorgeously shot romantic drama about impossibly beautiful people that still manages to feel real enough where it matters. It’s the kind of smart, heartfelt, mid-weight entertainment that rewards you for surrendering to its logic and savoring how its light cuts through the darkness for 100 minutes.

The journey we take with Maya has been in many ways such an epic one, in both literal and emotional scope, and it feels like after all of that, we should be taken somewhere more meaningful and left with insights more incisive than what we end up with. For a film so set on exploring the monumental sweep of both love and life, the end result soothes rather than soars.

The snapshots it provides of a love gained and lost can be as richly beautiful as they are inescapably agonizing, though the overall picture never quite leaves the profound impact it is searching for.

Morrison and Cox are presumably trying to tell a story of a woman turning away as the world beckons her to live on, but there’s something phony and too glossy about everything that happens to Maya.

For a film with such a weighty and timely premise, it’s a shame that it’s just not very good.