“Hey,
you got this.”
 |
| Photo Credit: Irreplaceable You/IMDb |
When
you say that to someone whose skin has taken on a grayish pallor, you don’t
really mean it—or at least you’re not certain about it. It’s more about hope
than comfort, and your face shows it as your expression twists into a
constipated mess of furrowed brow, clenched jaw, and disconcertingly intense
eyes. It’s a wish for a miracle, but the reality is something different. When
you say things like that to someone who is dying, it’s because you don’t want to
say goodbye for the final time, because you have a glimmer within yourself that
you will, indeed, see that person again.
And
yet, that hope is comfort when the tragedy of dying young is upon Abbie (Gugu
Mbatha-Raw) in Irreplaceable You, Stephanie Laing’s feature directorial
debut. When Abbie is left without any hope of her own—the cancer in her
midsection has grown too much for her to survive—she can only turn to comfort.
She accepts it tentatively from others, but mostly she focuses on distributing
(often misplaced) comfort to those she will soon leave behind, including her
fiancé, Sam (Michiel Huisman), with whom she is wildly, unrealistically, and,
frankly, annoyingly in love.
At
Irreplaceable You’s start, Abbie and Sam are the disgustingly happy couples
you see in commercials. They have the meet-cute story that they tell at parties
over and over until it becomes a fine-tuned comedy routine—she bit him when
they were kids and they’ve been together since, how adorable! With Mbatha-Raw
and Huisman adopting cutesy, sing-songy voices, they plead with each other to
stay in bed all week, responsibilities and hunger be damned. Considering how
they are 31 years old and have been together for 20-plus years, this is not
behavior you typically expect out of a long-term couple (that is unmarried only
because the movie needs them to be).
This
saccharinity is played two ways, and they do not dovetail in any meaningful
way. It appears to mock the fake, glossy romance sold to us by advertisements
and self-help gurus, like a cheery-looking bubble primed to burst from the bad
news of Abbie’s cancer diagnosis (the outcome of which is known from the very
beginning of the film). But it also forms the basis for the movie’s emotional
arc, and we are meant to accept the sugar at face value because the movie spent
15 minutes on it instead of showing Abbie and Sam as real people. This dramatic
dysfunction, driven by an urge to subvert that never manifests itself
authoritatively, kneecaps the entire first third of Irreplaceable You’s
96-minute runtime, and it spends the rest of the movie struggling to overcome
its misfired opening scenes.
Laing’s
and screenwriter Bess Wohl’s eagerness to break down earnestness with
heartbreak and truth bombs works far better once Abbie enters treatment for her
disease. The relationships she builds with the grumpy, fatalistic members of
her crochet therapy circle (run by English funnyman Steve Coogan sporting a
passing American accent!) and with her chemotherapy nurse (Veep’s
Timothy Simons) are when Irreplaceable You gets dark. It gets real. And,
somehow, it gets funnier, too.
Mbatha-Raw’s
performance is full of desperate, misguided do-gooder deeds, like setting up
dating profiles for Sam (without his knowledge or consent) and screening the
women who respond. She needs people like the nurse, who mocks her plan to ensure
Sam’s happiness after she’s gone, to break down her barriers of nonsense, to
keep her eye on the prize. If she’s toiling to make plans for Sam decades down
the line, the nurse points out, that means she doesn’t believe it’s even
possible to get better. He knows what she knows: This disease isn’t going away
and she’s not going to improve. Hell, he probably knows it better than she
does. And yet he still thinks that there’s a chance she could beat it by
tackling it head-on rather than busying herself with any trivial thing that’s
not fighting her cancer.
But
the nurse’s optimism is misguided. Abbie’s terminal, and she needs people in
her life to convince her to enjoy whatever time she has left with the people
who matter.
Enter
Myron, her crochet buddy. Played by Christopher Walken as a curmudgeon who
won’t let anyone get away with their bullshit, Myron gets all the best lines
from Wohl’s script, including telling Abbie that she shouldn’t bother trying to
control Sam’s love life after she’s gone because, no matter what she does,
Sam’s “gonna go through a major slut phase,” before punctuating the insult with
the observation that Abbie has “a terrible ass.” Myron’s meanness is the good
stuff, that prime USDA joke meat that is both spiritually true and chuckle-worthy,
and it’s a shame that the movie couldn’t refocus itself on Abbie’s therapy—and
her embrace of what’s coming for her—more fully.
Because
if it had done that, it wouldn’t have concerned itself with trying to project
fake happiness with a cannon’s force. Happiness is a dud when it comes to
drama. Struggle, self-deprecation, and acceptance of one’s own smallness in the
universe, that’s the stuff that works. That’s the stuff that earns the tears in
an audience’s eyes when someone lies to a dying person for the last time, “Hey,
you got this.”
Director:
Stephanie Laing
Writer:
Bess Wohl
Starring:
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michiel Huisman, Christopher Walken, Brian Tyree Henry,
Timothy Simons
Available
now on Netflix
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