“Movies are dead,” is one of those common, overly fraught phrases you’ll see nowadays on social media, specifically Twitter/X, that comes in the wake of yet another impending doom acquisition – in this case, Paramount acquiring Warner Brothers to merge into what is now Skydance, which has the future of the entertainment industry at a weary fork in the road. While all of this may be true, sometimes we can still get a valuable piece of artistic expression like Rachel Morrison’s Love of Your Life, an honest, beautifully-shot pandemic drama with plenty of modern, self-reflecting themes, in a genre that is difficult to gain traction on unless you make it a young-adult television series about some hockey players.
For all these reasons, it begrudgingly makes total sense that the film will be dumped onto Prime Video next week – after an assumed shallow limited release – for households to watch while simultaneously getting their dopamine hits on TikTok. Nonetheless, we can appreciate the fact that it will be so widely visible, making it something worth engaging with, considering the quality feels much more highly regarded than typical streaming fare.
The film begins in a Boston emergency room where we’re introduced to our profoundly single nurse, Maya, played by the always interesting Margaret Qualley. Maya has a bit of a lost essence, treating her role like the means to fill some sort of unspecified void of her past where absenteeism is not doubted. When Maya hops on a trainnn in Boston – sorry! – to meet up for a Facebook Marketplace negotiation with Charlie, played by Gabriel Brasso, they quickly share some blushes and then materialize their meet-cute over an old piece of furniture, then naturally leading into a first date.
Maya and Charlie are a refreshingly flipped dynamic. Usually, in these stories, the man tends to be the loner-centric character who finds his a long-lost manic-pixie-dream girl to save his life. This is not the case in Morrison’s film. Maya’s Gen-z doom and despair take on her love life is impressively modern, and feels earned given the circumstances of Charlie being such a golden retriever of a person. While Charlie, who was an adopted child, has felt love throughout his entire life to make him who he is, Maya is someone who prefers to expect disappointment rather than giving more than she feels appropriate to protect her livelihood.
And yet, Maya falls for Charlie. Cue the good life in Boston montage! Walks home from Fenway Park, friends of both meeting one another (most notably Maya’s college best friend Jason, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger), and a spontaneous wedding ceremony in their very own apartment during a wicked-pissah thunderstorm. Life is joyous. Then, we’re hit with a small time-jump and a shot of a television displaying news of the first reported cases of Covid-19. And like many of those around the world, Maya, a nurse in an ER and wife of someone with asthma, is faced with the total destruction of her life from these events.
How the pandemic is ultimately depicted in this film is extremely dire and something that we can only expect to see a lot more in art. It was a bit jarring to see something so recent yet so otherworldly being depicted on screen, and I applaud the technical level at which Morrison and cinematographer Todd Banhazl were able to operate on during this sequence. This may be a tough sequence to stomach for those who continue to romanticize the lockdown.
Avoiding spoiler territory, much of the core here is an unadulterated blunt sadness. We’re surprised with another time-jump, which is noted by the effective title card reading Maya’s age, to which we find our broken heroine waking up in someone else’s bed in Lisbon. We’re told indirectly that Maya is now working for a Telehealth company wandering around in her sad-girl tank top and jean shorts struggling to hold any sort of non-sexual relationship with another person due to her immense loss of love.
This is not a rediscovery of sorts for Maya, its utter pain and isolated hopelessness. To give itself credit, many of these types of joints would be manipulative of its main character, trying to inch closer to get teardrops on your sweater, but Julia Cox’s screenplay is neither judgemental nor exploiting any idea of ‘grief fetishism’, in this case, Maya is treated with care.
Only amid the solo dinners and endlessly flowing wine against Portugal’s breathtaking coastal backdrop does Maya encounter another prospective night of fulfillment, sparked by tending to a hand wound suffered by Felix, a tourist from London, portrayed by the ridiculously handsome Aaron Pierre. Both go home together, but Maya is able to dip out the door before Felix wakes up. From here, the film is laying the foundation for another seemingly perfect fit for Maya. Felix is a London-based businessman who happens to be a single-father, certainly on his own journey in terms of finding the next step in his love life. The two are once again brought back together after another run-in when Felix invites Maya to join him for the rest of his business trip and to London. Maya decides to accept this proposal.
From there, the screenplay unfolds in a fairly conventional way for Maya. After some stages of advancement with Felix, the two characters are each able to have their very own scene of closure. There’s a lot to love with how the story decides to put a ribbon on Maya’s story. Some much needed closure from some familiar folks from Boston – most notably with Jason, her estranged best friend who has also cleaned himself up from the couch-surfing, long haired persona he once inhabited – is one of those essential moments of how to land your plane.
Love of Your Life is nicely concocted with an inspired Julian Casablancas deep-cut needle-drop, intimate performances, and an overtly mature thesis on how people enter and exit our lives far more often than we may think. I’m not sure if the film will be amongst the year’s best dramas, but this is certainly the highest level of Prime Video content you can find in your living room, perhaps since it was an acquisition. This is a real ‘movie movie’, if you catch my drift.
Love of Your Life hits limited theaters starting October 7th before making its worldwide streaming premiere on Prime Video on October 14th.
Wyatt Allison can be found on Twitter/X @wyattartsknox and on Letterboxd @filmwyatt.
