You can’t help rooting for Colleen Hoover heroines, bless their bruised hearts. The bestselling novelist specializes in women who have been kicked around by life. She’s the new name brand of tragic romance, picking up where Nicholas Sparks’ terminal diseases left off.
“Reminders of Him,” directed by Vanessa Caswill, is the third film based on a Hoover book in three years and the first that the author herself has adapted alongside co-screenwriter Lauren Levine. Like the others, its lead suffers heartily before falling in love with a hunk. The previous two, “It Ends With Us” and “Regretting You,” were about, respectively, domestic abuse and adultery. “Reminders” adds more tarnish to the poor dear: She’s an ex-convict who served six years for killing her boyfriend in a DUI.
Finally freed from prison, Kenna (Maika Monroe) has returned to Laramie, Wyo., the hometown of her dead lover, Scotty (Rudy Pankow). From what we see of Scotty in flashbacks, he was a buoyant blond goofball — exactly the kind of guy that the apparently friendless and family-less Kenna would have clung to like a life preserver. But she’s not here to lay flowers at his grave. In a salty touch, the first thing Kenna does is remove his roadside cross, claiming he hated memorial shrines.
But Kenna is desperate to meet their 5-year-old daughter, Diem (Zoe Kosovic), who was born months into her incarceration. The girl’s name comes from carpe diem, as in Kenna’s vow to seize the child she never got to hold, but the script has the restraint not to make a big standing-on-a-desk speech about that. Nevertheless, the kid’s grandparents, Grace and Patrick (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford), who never liked Kenna to begin with, consider a restraining order in fear that Kenna might actually kidnap Diem.
The stakes are plain: Can Kenna prove herself worthy to be Diem’s mother? Her only tentative ally is Scotty’s childhood friend, Ledger (Tyriq Withers), who thinks she’s hot and intriguing until he realizes who she is. Then he wants Kenna gone too.
Caswill sets the mood with a shot of a snow-capped mountain range, fitting for a movie that proceeds at a glacial pace. (The book moves faster, with Kenna and Ledger hooking up immediately and then discovering their unfortunate connection.)
The first stretch of the movie is strong, with Kenna, who is too broke for a car or even a phone, hoofing it around town in search of any job willing to hire a broke girl with a criminal record. A grocery store manager sends her away coldly after nattering on in corporate-speak about the importance of treating people with respect — an exchange that feels so real it gives you the shivers — but his beleaguered assistant, Amy (country singer Lainey Wilson in her promising, but brief, film debut), steps in and treats Kenna like a person. “What’s your trauma?” Amy asks her and somehow Wilson delivers that line with a lilt that keeps it from sounding corny.
These female strangers share a moment of such sincere human connection that I would have happily watched a dozen more scenes of the two women leaning on each other while they endure their hard-luck lives. Alas, these nice detours don’t last long; the movie has a preordained higher parental purpose that’s bigger than anything else onscreen, from the Wyoming skies to the bond between Kenna and Ledger that’s the main reason an audience has bothered to come.
Where this is all going is as unavoidable as the fact that Scotty died on what seems to be only road in and out of town. As the title declares, there are traces of him everywhere, including Diem’s giggle.
To get anywhere with the film, you have to settle into the idea that Kenna and Ledger must slowly build trust in each other while spending most of the baggy running time talking about a little girl who is rarely around. (When Kosovic is, she’s charming.) Cinematographer Tim Ives snatches his rare opportunities to shoot the beautiful scenery, but most of the pair’s encounters take place in or near Ledger’s orange pickup truck, a totem from the book. Visually, these car chats get stagnant. At least Monroe and Withers generate decent chemistry, eyes shiny and gleaming as they try their hardest to put gas in this love story’s tank.
Ledger calls Kenna “the saddest girl in the world.” True, but the glumness of said world is central to Hoover’s zeitgeisty appeal — a point she underlines a few beats later, Kenna insisting that the radio only ever plays depressing songs. To prove her wrong, Ledger flips it on anyway and to his dismay, it plays one bummer after another, station after station, until finally, the two of them share a much-needed laugh. (Meanwhile, Tom Howe’s acoustic country score is adamantly winsome, even intercut with Coldplay covers.)
Hoover is a strong world-builder. When she writes about small towns with shuttered bookstores or dive bars with fetid pots of coffee, you feel that she truly knows these places and has made a principled choice to set her hard-earned happy endings there. Caswill gets it, keying into credible, lived-in details, like Kenna’s tiny glance at the price tag on a stuffed animal that she’s considering for Diem.
Monroe’s Kenna couldn’t be farther from the cliché romantic diva, usually a high-heeled glamazon who runs a cupcake boutique. Even her hair really does look like she fixed it in the squalid bathroom of the only apartment she can afford. The complex is called Paradise, an on-the-nose irony. The owner (Jennifer Robertson) cuts Kenna a deal if she promises to take a free kitten. (I never saw Kenna get a litter box, but the kitten’s pretty cute.)
Ledger is the fantasy: a former NFL player whose hobbies include babysitting Diem, wearing tight shirts and building himself a hilltop dream cabin that will someday belong in Architectural Digest. (He owns that dive bar but the cast stays Mormon-sober.) Withers, a former wide receiver at Florida State University, also played a football jock in the gorgeously made but narratively screwy horror film “Him,” and it’s a treat to see an actor who moves like a genuine athlete and has that “Yes, coach” politeness that comes from being humbled in a locker room. You don’t totally buy his character exists in reality, but Withers believes in it enough to get the job done.
Another Paradise tenant, Lady Diana (Monika Myers), a headstrong teenager with Down syndrome, is the closest thing the film has to comic relief. Bursting into Kenna’s quarters seemingly at will, she raids her near-empty fridge while bluntly shouldering much of the exposition. “Why are you so poor?” Lady Diana asks, following that up by wondering, “Why are you so sad?”
“Reminders of Him” could use a little more swooning, a little less of the endless middle stretch of driving and talking, interrupted by wet sprints through thunderstorms. The rain pours down so often that you can’t help but snort when the film cuts to Whitford’s granddad angrily watering his lawn.
Eventually, even the film itself seems over all of the dilly-dallying. It takes a narrative shortcut to wrap things up, leaving behind not much other than a few worthwhile scenes: Kenna and Scotty’s meet-cute at a dollar store, her and Ledger pushing through their morning-after guilt, and a powerful moment shortly after Diem’s birth when a fellow inmate gives her a friendly but stern pep talk that sums up everything this film takes nearly two hours to say.
‘Reminders of Him’
Rated: PG-13, for sexual content, strong language, drug content, some violent content, and brief partial nudity
Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, March 13 in wide release.
