Feeling trumps sentiment in three-hankie picture

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This article was published 06/11/2015 (3984 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Drew Barrymore is basically Hollywood’s BFF. She’s the star you’d call after a bad breakup, and she’d come over with a bottle of rosé and get you drunk and tell you he was never halfway good enough for you anyway. She’s that kind of gal.

So it feels absolutely right that Barrymore is starring, along with the wonderful, underused Toni Collette, in a story of lifelong female friendship. Messy, funny and emotionally generous, Miss You Already is a full-on weepie. (Make sure to take tissues.) The London-set story has its missteps — obvious plot manipulations, awkward montages and clunking transitions — but many viewers will forgive them, the way we forgive our friends their little idiosyncrasies.

In a flood of happy-sad tears, Miss You Already touches on terminal illness, fertility issues and tricky mother-daughter relationships, basically a women’s-picture trifecta. But while structure and subject reference traditional melodrama, scripter Morwenna Banks, director Catherine Hardwicke and the two leads update the genre with bawdy humour and a casual, comfortable kind of intimacy.

Barrymore plays Jess, an American who was transplanted to England as a schoolgirl and immediately bonded with Milly (Collette). The two girls grew up together, reading Wuthering Heights and giggling about Heathcliff and his “erect (long pause) and handsome figure.” Milly becomes a hard-drinking party-girl who marries a roadie, Kit (Dominic Cooper), and unexpectedly falls into family domesticity. The quieter, more self-contained Jess marries Jago (Paddy Considine), but the couple struggles to have a baby.

Everyone is living more or less happily in movie-type shabby-chic bohemianism. (Jess and Jago reside on a quaint, multi-coloured houseboat — of course!) Then Milly goes in for what is supposed to be a routine medical followup. As soon as we see her doctor’s face, we know we’re heading into cancer-drama territory, with all its potential clichés.

Fortunately, Collette is a rigorously unsentimental actor, and the script follows Milly’s treatment with forthright honesty and dark humour. In particular, Banks, a British comic writer and actor, makes it clear that people living with cancer have enough on their plates without having to function as wisdom-dispensing saints for the rest of us.

At the lowest point of the women’s friendship, Jess actually accuses Milly of being a “cancer bully” and using her illness as an excuse for bad behaviour. It’s refreshing that as Milly loses her health, her hair and her cherished independence, Collette is able to explore not just strength and resilience but also shadings of vanity, anger and selfishness.

The husbands are sympathetic but secondary characters. The heart of the story is the bond between the two women, and Hardwicke — who made it big with Twilight but should be better known for her frank view of female adolescence in Thirteen — observes their friendship with tender honesty.

Ultimately, that’s why this flawed film still works. Even when the plot is contrived, the feelings are genuine.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca