Release Date: 02/14/14
The story of a privileged girl and a charismatic boy whose instant desire sparks a love affair made only more reckless by parents trying to keep them apart.
I said I wanted a movie to be excited about, and this week I'm at least covering one worthy of guarded optimism. I will admit to having a soft spot for these types of movies; these types of heart attack serious, as tragic as possible love stories focusing on some star-crossed couple speak to the hopeless romantic in me. The issue they all have is walking the razor's edge between drama and melodrama; between serious and laughably so. The greats like Blue Valentine and Leaving Las Vegas can walk that fine line. The misses like Save The Last Dance stumble early and often. One of the easiest mistakes they can make is in the leads. These movies, more than any besides maybe the "buddy cop" genre, will rely on the chemistry between their two stars, so if that falls flat, it doesn't matter what else is around it: the movie will fail. In this regard, the trailer for Endless Love makes me worry. The stars looks pretty wooden, and the trailer attempts to minimize the dialogue with a strange rendition of Robert Palmer's 'Addicted to Love' that would seem better suited for a stalker-themed horror movie than this. If the trailer's seems like it's trying to hide something, that's probably because it is and it's not a good sign.
They've made this movie before, in 1981, with Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt in the leads. However, unlike Hollywood's recent string of unnecessary remakes, there are decent grounds for this one. That movie was made over 30 years ago, and wastes the premise of an acclaimed novel on an adaptation that currently holds a 23% on Rotten Tomatoes (even though nostalgia usually raises the scores of movies like these several points), so there's room for change here. To that end, this script alters many of the details, shifting the conservative family to Jade's side from David's. The problem is, this actually opens it up to plenty of clichés that have been done to death: the bad boy with a heart of gold, the overprotective father of the female lead, the too-innocent girl, and this movie, led by director and co-writer Shana Feste (Country Strong and not much else), doesn't look experienced enough to avoid or put any sort of original spin on them. Even if it can, the trailer seems to imply a decidedly long narrative, where this couple will encounter obstacle after obstacle and just as in Like Crazy, that can lead to an audience throwing up their hands over two protagonists who have been revealed as so stubborn in their insistence that a doomed relationship work, that they can't be identified with.
That's a healthy dose of skepticism for a movie that I gave a ceiling of 4 stars, but considering we only have one trailer to go off of, and it's decidedly cryptic, there's potential here. I said marketing is one of the Ten Biggest Mistakes a Movie Can Make and perhaps that holds true here. Maybe whoever cut the trailer was a little too in love with concealing details, at the expense of not giving any hint of the movie's quality. If Wilde and Pettyfer have chemistry, the movie's already off to a strong start. At that point, staying anything near the novel's storyline (which I haven't read, but assume it's acclaimed for a reason), would raise its floor considerably. Jade's rebellion against her parents will undoubtedly ask Wilde to cover more ground than Pettyfer will have to as David (the trailer makes it look like the storyline of the laissez faire parents that would've been shifted to David in this telling have been eliminated entirely), so if Wilde is up to the task, the movie could find some traction.
We also get hints that this ending won't stray far from either the novel or the original film. In a laughably misguided attempt to win over Jade's parents, David would start a fire at their house, expecting to return moments later to extinguish it and be labelled the hero. Obviously, it goes wrong. If Endless Love is going to stick with that route, that's a hard ending to pull off with modern audiences, without the character's motives being a serious liability to the continuity of the movie. Some of the alterations they've made to David's background appear geared to sliding this into the realm of possibility with a potential legal history showing that arson wouldn't be that big of a stretch. Maybe the movie can sell us on that ending, or perhaps the flames in the trailer don't denote its finale, but as a man who railed against the current state of romance movies, I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic since at least it's trying something that isn't that common anymore: a love story that you know from the beginning can't have a happy ending. Hopefully, it at least does well enough to show Hollywood it's worth thinking outside the box once in a while in this genre.