Reminders of Him Blu-ray Review: Pretty, Pretty Pain Cave
Glamorous melodrama makes the life of a broke ex-con look beautiful
WARNING: I consider Blu-ray reviews of movies that had a theatrical run to be fair game for spoilers.
Reminders of Him is a pretty movie, and I mean that in many senses of the term. From its wide mountain vistas to its made-from-scratch bar that used to be a bookstore/coffee shop, to a seedy apartment building ironically/pointedly named “Paradise” that still looks better than some studios I’ve lived in, it’s a super-romanticized vision of lower-class rural America, as perhaps only an English director could see it. Its stars are beautiful too: Maika Monroe is who she is, and does not look like somebody who just did six years in prison; former CW star Tyriq Withers looks like about a 50% more handsome version of Pete Davidson. He frequently takes of his shirt; she pretends she’s about to take off hers a time or two. There’s even a kitten, one that’s less metaphoric but much more successfully exploited for the d’awwws than the one in Sorry Baby.
This is a movie that looks great. Sadly, predictably, the story proves to be as overly neat as the movie’s Hollywood-beautiful poverty (if I didn’t hate the misuse of the term “porn,” I might say “lowbrow-porn”). This, of course, may be the point: a weepie romance with glamorous stars where it all works out in the end is precisely the sort of movie “they” don’t make any more. Is it because the market has changes? As the decided non-target for the genre, I can’t say, but I’ve heard Netflix is full of this kind of stuff, only it’s shot boringly flat like generic TV, or so a lot of the reviews seem to complain. Reminders of Him is cinematic in all the best visual ways, with clear thought behind every camera move, color, and aesthetic choice – virtually every location is either built from scratch or heavily augmented by the production to create a specific look. If you like this sort of thing generally, it’s giving you the grandest version.
I may have been spoiled by Sean Baker movies, though. I like my lower-class slumming to feel seedy, and if I’m looking for a reluctantly criminal mom living in a motel, The Florida Project is more my speed. That said, as a half-English person who grew up overseas, I fully get the romanticizing of small-town America. Small-town England is, like, a gas station, a church, and maybe a pub in the middle of a bunch of fields. Small-town America still feels connected to the larger world in a different way, and is bigger than that. Director Vanessa Caswill has a track record of English TV miniseries-es, and is evidently good at what she does. It’s only her taste in stories to tell that I find arguably questionable. The movie is based on a novel; Caswill read the script before the book, and liked it enough on the spot.
Maika Monroe is Kenna Rowen, a name that to my ears sounded a lot like “Gena Rowlands” the first time it’s said aloud, which may or may not be intentional or my mental wishcasting. Frankly, if a big studio decided to try to make a Cassavetes script, throwing all the money at it, removing the improv, and enforcing a tidy ending while missing the original point entirely, this could be the result. And by the way, I’m not saying that’s an invalid choice, necessarily.
Kenna did her time for vehicular manslaughter, having crashed her car with her boyfriend Scotty (Rudy Pankow) in it. She found out later that she was pregnant, had to give birth and give her daughter away in prison, and now wants to see the girl, named Diem, despite her grandparent guardians (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford; yep, they’re playing grandparents now) hating Kenna probably more than anyone in the world.
When she encounters handsome ex football player Ledger (Withers) at his bar, she doesn’t instantly recognize him as Scotty’s best friend, nor he her. There’s an instant spark, mainly because they both look like movie stars, but she runs off after hearing his name and recognizing his Dukes-of-Hazzard-orange pickup truck. It’s not long before he figures it out...and then falls for her anyway, probably, again, because she looks like Maika Monroe. Somehow I think the story wouldn’t be as believable if, say, Taryn Manning in her Orange Is the New Black makeup were in the role of Kenna. Or Crazy Eyes.
The trailer implied he falls for her first, then learns who she is, which might be more plausible. I give the movie credit for departing a little from the book on this one, and giving him full agency to take the crazy risk of banging the estranged mom of his dead bestie whose daughter he has helped raise alongside grieving, angry grandparents. How ever will he extricate himself from that one?
Too easily, it turns out.
The movie makes a smart choice in hiding the details of Kenna’s crime from us for most of the movie, as this allows us to sympathize with her as an underdog who can’t catch a break. You might think that when the truth finally comes out, it will be a shock to us that tests our newfound understanding. You’d be wrong – the accident has just about as many mitigating circumstances as it’s possible to have and still result in a punitive sentence. And since this is a movie, everyone ultimately understands.
This is also the kind of movie that, when it wants to speak blunt truths about how Ledger kind of sucks, puts them in the mouth of a girl with Down Syndrome, to make the brutal honesty more adorable. Monika Myers is great in the role, but she has been handed a trope of a character. Caswill pointedly wanted there to be no villains in the story, which is likely why one of the deleted scenes features Kenna’s mother (Anne Hawthorne) being gratuitously awful. The others included on the disc are minor – one belabors the Tinder joke, another shows Ledger working on his house, and they add little to the story.
Short behind-the-scenes featurettes are fun enough, especially for fans of Colleen Hoover, the original writer, who was on set. More interesting, though, is the commentary track, which I couldn’t find accessible on Movies Anywhere, but it can be accessed both from the extras menu and audio options on the disc. Caswill talks in depth about every visual choice, and it’s clear she thought a lot about every aspect of the film, which pays off in a final product that, again, feels like cinema, even when watched on TV. Now, if she had an actual good script to put all that thought into, she’d really be cooking. It’s clear that she thinks this is that script, or at least is a good trouper and pretends that it is.
It’s also clear she thinks the movie is funnier than it is – aside from Myers with the blunt quips, I mostly found it to be sadness piled on sadness, in a layer of hotness. And then everything works out, after everyone has cried about it. I get that such is the catharsis of melodrama, and I enjoyed the bookending metaphor of her initially vandalizing a roadside memorial, to literally carry the cross that she only puts back at the end. I’m not sure that what any audience wants these days is movie stars trying to slum it by playing working class sufferers and looking perfect while doing so.
If you do, though, this excels at that, and looks as good overall as its stars.
Reminders Of Him is now on Digital and Blu-ray™ and DVD as of May 19. All images courtesy of Universal.
Prefer not to subscribe via Substack? You can leave a tip through Buy Me a Coffee instead.
You can also do PayPal.