The thing you should know about The Vow before you sit down to watch it with a loved one is that it isn’t the movie it was advertised as. This isn’t a movie about the transcendent power of love. It’s not about a man who refuses to quit fighting, no matter what, when it appears that the love of his life has been lost to him. That was all just manipulation by the marketers because Valentine’s Day is coming up. Actually, this one is much more an exploration of identity than it is a romance, although it does have plenty of romantic elements. The Vow tells its story with a bit more subtlety than you might expect from a movie that uses phrases like “once in a lifetime love,” and it grounds itself in reality much more than you might expect from a story dealing with amnesia. That’s not to say that this one isn’t a pick appropriate to go see with a date on Valentine’s Day, however. While The Vow isn’t anything special, or even a success, it’s still solid enough when stacked up against the usual, sappy nonsense that men get dragged to on February 14th.
The couple we’re focused on here are Paige (Rachel McAdams), a former rich girl from the suburbs who dropped out of law school to move to the city, be poor, and become an artist, and Leo (Channing Tatum), an almost impossibly supportive and loving Bohemian type who plays music and runs his own recording studio. They met at the DMV, fell in love, and had a charming, hipster wedding alongside all of their charming, hipster friends. Tragedy strikes one snowy night after they take in a film at an art house theater, however. After stopping at an intersection and unbuckling themselves to do a little spontaneous canoodling, the slick roads cause a gigantic truck to smash into their car, and the impact sends Paige hurtling through the windshield. The effects are that she is temporarily put in a coma, and when she wakes up the damages to her brain have caused her to forget the last few years of her life. She doesn’t know that she has dropped out of law school, doesn’t know that she has stopped talking to her family, doesn’t know that she is no longer engaged to a smarmy, preppy type (Scott Speedman), and doesn’t know that she and her husband have ever met. No, as far as she’s concerned, she’s still a daddy’s girl law student who lives out in the suburbs, eats meat, and is soon to be a lawyer. What’s a Channing Tatum to do?
Romantic movies like this are usually only as good as their leads, and this is the first place we can look to understand why I consider this one to be a poor to middling effort. Rachel McAdams is fine here, as she usually is in most things. When Paige wakes up and suddenly starts acting like a spoiled little brat who spurns the affections of her hopelessly devoted husband, the instinct is to hate her. But McAdams is always able to show enough conflict on her face, and give us enough indication through her body language that she’s a nice person who would like to remain loyal to her man, but who can’t be expected to live a life that she doesn’t remember, that we never fall into the trap of hating her; even when she starts doing things that we don’t like. We have sympathy for her, even though Leo is the one who really takes the brunt of this tragic accident’s consequences.
Channing Tatum, though, I didn’t respond to him as the male lead nearly as strongly. And though this guy gets a lot of hate thrown his way for being a big handsome lump who can’t really emote or project any kind of charisma, I don’t think that the fact that he mostly fails in this role is his fault so much as it is the fault of those who cast him. Tatum never gets any big scenes where he’s asked to have any meltdowns, and if anything Leo’s reaction to the reality of losing the love of his life is pretty subdued, but I thought that he did a decent job of selling the little crying and dramatics that came his way. The problem is that Tatum is just too chiseled, beautiful, and dull to pull off the scraggly hipster character he’s supposed to be playing. You can’t put a vintage sweater and a goofy hat on the captain of the football team and tell me that he’s the artsy type who lives in a trendy loft and spends his free time writing songs in cafes. I’m just not going to buy it. And though Tatum pulls off the limited crying stuff he’s asked to perform well enough, in a scene where he’s supposed to be giving an impassioned speech about the magic of a live recording session, and the warmth of sound that you just can’t get composing on your computer, he just looks like a real dope. He doesn’t sell it at all, and I started to understand where all of the hate for his performances comes from.
Plus, Leo is just never a complex enough character for us to sympathize with. He’s going through about the worst thing I can ever imagine, but you can’t help but think that he could just walk out of the situation and be in just as amazing a marriage within six month’s time. He’s painted as a superman whose love is purer than everyone else’s, whose heart is more open than everyone else’s, who is handsomer than everyone else, is a better musician than everyone else, is more charming than everyone else, has cooler friends than everyone else, a better life than everyone else, a career that’s booming more than anyone else’s... it’s as if the screenwriters and casting people wanted to create an ultimate fantasy man for women to watch this movie and swoon over more than they wanted to create a real person who we could relate to (a shocking accusation, I know). I can’t help but think that if someone other than Tatum had been cast, we might have got a more nuanced characterization, some bigger choices might have been made as far as how to depict the dramatics of losing the love of your life, and the whole movie would have been a lot more affecting. As is, the romance angle of the film almost takes a complete backseat to the Paige reconnecting with her estranged family storyline. When Leo vows to do whatever it takes to make his wife fall in love with him again and then gives up about fifteen minutes later the whole film just starts to feel hilariously pointless.
The crafting of the Paige character doesn’t help in that regard either. The pre and post amnesia Paige are just too different from one another for us to buy any of the drama that she’s going through. Somewhere in the second act it’s revealed that her change of character was jumpstarted by a secret that she learned about her father, and a fight that followed. Admittedly, it’s kind of a bastard of a secret, but the change that it spurns is ludicrous. So a girl doesn’t feel that she can trust her dad anymore, does that mean that she would respond by changing her career, her political views, her diet, the way she dresses, her taste in literature, etc... ? It’s all a bit much. Somebody can go through some immense changes over the course of a few years, but these two Paiges are complete opposites, and it all feels falsely crafted in order to create drama: first between Paige and Leo when she can’t remember him and then between Paige and her family when she relearns what she had unlearned.
The great failure of this film as far as its status as a romance goes is that the drama between Paige and family supersedes the drama between Paige and husband. Toward the third act of the film Tatum’s character disappears almost completely, and the whole thing becomes about Paige’s struggle to figure out who she is. That’s a shame, because I think the people who go to see this movie are in it for the husband vowing to make his wife fall in love with him again plot more than they are the art school vs. law school question. And, actually, the romantic elements of this story were generally better told than the identity elements. Sure, there was a lot of clunky voice over narration from Tatum that came off as mushy nonsense and didn’t amount to anything, but at least it wasn’t as ridiculous as watching a woman decide whether she wanted to live her life as either Anne Coulter or your hippy aunt. The Vow works better than most contemporary romances because it doesn’t abjectly fail at anything, and it, at least, doesn’t try to be funny. You can go see it without being afraid of walking away completely miserable. I just wouldn’t recommend you do so unless somebody cute forces the issue.
