There’s a very big reminder of “him” — Scotty Landry (Rudy Pankow), killed in a car accident — right at the start of this dreary tearjerker, but Kenna (Maika Monroe) jumps out of her ride, kicks it to the ground and steals it. “He hated memorials,” she tells us in voiceover, as if anybody really would want a makeshift wooden cross and some wilted gas station flowers to mark their last and final resting place. Kenna is coming home after five years in the slammer, back to “where it all went wrong to see if I can get something right,” an indication of the quality of the dialogue in the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation.
Renting an empty room, Kenna wonders to herself whether she’ll ever be absolved of her wrongdoing, musing, “Maybe then they’ll let me see her.” Although it takes a good 20 minutes to be revealed, it soon transpires that Kenna was Scotty’s fiancée and the DUI driver of the car on the day he died; while serving a seven-year sentence, she gave birth to their daughter Diem, a little girl and a soul so old she could have been played by the late Joan Rivers. Diem is being raised by her grandparents, but watching over her is Scotty’s old friend Ledger (Tyriq Withers), who runs a bar that used to be a bookstore that Scotty and Kenna used to frequent, if you can believe either of them have even so much as looked at a book.
In true Hoover-movie fashion, the action takes place in the past and the present, starting in earnest when Kenna happens upon Ledger’s bar and catches his eye. For some reason, Ledger, despite being Scotty’s bestie, has never met Kenna before, and only saw her mug shot once, after she was arrested, a state of affairs that is never satisfactorily explained (just that he was “never really around”).
Ledger finds out who she is soon enough but decides to stick around anyway, acting as a buffer between Kenna and Scotty’s parents, whose silent grief and mean, judgmental faces at her trial are of a kind not much seen since the introduction of sound. “She left him there,” they tell Ledger, one of many plot points that conveniently fall apart within seconds of actually being fact-checked.
Kenna, meanwhile, is falling for Ledger, whose moody good looks come with a heart to match. Indeed, in a scene torn straight from the pages of Things That Never Happened Daily, Kenna discovers that the recently single Ledger’s wedding fell through on account of his closeness with Diem. But even with Ledger onside, Kenna still faces the wrath of Grace and Patrick, Diem’s grandparents.
Again, why this should be, given that what happened was an accident, is never fully explained; Ledger puts it down to her performance in court. “It wasn’t a good look,” he says, without specifying what this “it” actually was (presumably that she didn’t look performatively grief-stricken enough?). And so, the final pieces of the jigsaw — and these films always are a jigsaw — come into play. Can Ledger be the peacekeeper, and will Kenna ever be reunited with her daughter?
Obviously, yes, a fact more than signaled by the cozy cinematography, which looks like an insurance ad for most of the present-day scenes and an out-of-focus Avatar movie when Kenna is having flashbacks to that fateful night with Scotty. Amazingly, though, the actors pull through it with (most of) their dignity intact, much like they did in last year’s only slightly more ludicrous Hoover vehicle Regretting You. In that respect, Reminders of Him isn’t so much an ensemble movie as a hostage crisis; one wonders if Scotty’s parents have so little dialogue because they’re too embarrassed to say what’s been written for them and are desperately making the SOS hand signal to their agents behind their backs.
It all adds up to a lot of ridiculously lovey-dovey hokum that might be endearing if it weren’t so gloomy, culminating in a perversely chirpy ending that seems to ask, “Hey, who was the real victim of this perfectly avoidable fatal drink-drive incident?” If there’s one takeaway, though, it’s never listen to Coldplay while driving round country roads after dark. Just to be safe, though, maybe never listen to Coldplay at any hour of the day, or, for that matter, even at all.
Title: Reminders of Him
Director: Vanessa Vaswill
Cast: Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Rudy Pankow, Lainey Wilson, Lauren Graham, Bradley Whitford
Distributor: Universal
Running time: 1 hr 55 mins