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Movie Review: The Vow‘s Profound Love Story is Butchered in Pursuit of a Mass Audience

A heartbreaking tale of love's memory lost to a horrible accident, this star-driven romance turns the deepest longings of the heart into advice column cliches.
By Peter Simek |
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The Vow is The Notebook meets Shattered, a story about a woman who loses her memory of her relationship with her husband after a car accident. It is a movie intended – by producers, casting directors, and marketers – to be this year’s go-to Valentine’s Day date movie, a brush off, feel good trifle that girls will drag their guys to out of deference to the ingrained rituals of the Hallmark holiday. Still it is hard to shake the feeling that it could be so much better, given the scenario, something that strikes a little closer to the heart about questions of love, longing, and the fragility of human identity.

Instead, The Vow is a is a visually witless thing – establish, over-the-shoulder, over-the-shoulder, rinse repeat, fade – and its most supposedly poignant moments sound like Ann Landers meets Mad Lib (“I want you to accept me for who I am,” etc. etc.). It’s not that director Michael Sucsy needs to dazzle us, but his sense of development and scenic space is so rudimentary and plastic there’s no texture or romance to his images. As for the gag factor, how about leading man, Leo (Channing Tatum), asking his leading lady, Paige (Rachel McAdams), to shack up with him by spelling out “Move in?” with blueberries on a plate of pancakes – in front of Leo’s band mates? There’s not a lot of imagination here.

Shortly after The Vow’s first scene, a magical moment of snow, film, and affection shared between newly married Leo and Paige in a gorgeous, wintery Chicago (the sexiest thing in this film – the city, I mean, and Sucsy does have a knack for shooting postcards), they are rear ended by a salting truck. Paige goes through the windshield, ends up in a coma, and when she eventually awakes, she doesn’t remember Leo or their love affair. What Paige does remember is who she was a few years before she met Leo, before she dropped out of law school, broke up with her smarmy finance professional fiancé, and moved to Chicago to pursue her true passions: first art, then Leo.

Part of the problem here is Channing Tatum, who has proven again (see: Dear John) that he is not much of a romantic lead. He is a dullard; a charmless, charismatic void. His face is too airbrushed and unblemished to welcome or woo. As an actor, he has two tools: “sincere” and “wounded.” And when he sports the accoutrement of personalities or characters that aren’t straight beefcake frat boy, such as the wicker hat or white sweater in The Vow, he looks goofy and forced, like an American Gladiator in a  pinup calendar holding a fishing rod. All Tatum really lends The Vow is visual incoherence.

McAdams, on the other hand, has played this role before in The Notebook, only here she puts on two faces – the artist and the prissy bourgeois daughter of a suburban judge – to nice effect. But none of the meat of The Vow’s material — the double personality, the memory loss, questions of identity, the friction between the married couple, the familial squabbling — is allowed more than a few meaningful lines of dialogue. Instead we get the movie equivalent of a box of bonbons, lots of candid, squishy vignettes of the two lovers, each hiding a bitter sweet melancholic center: our knowledge that the years of flashback romance unravel in the film’s first scene. Its supposed to make us swoon — set the mood for love with equal doses of sweet love and sweet loss. Perhaps The Vow’s most remarkable feature, then, is that despite these sharply contrasting flavors, by the time the credits role there’s hardly any aftertaste to The Vow at all. Guys looking for a romantic 14th may need to stock reinforcements.

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