93 min | PG-13 | December 4, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Jennifer and Solomon fall in love and start planning a wedding. Then a terminal diagnosis turns the engagement into a race against the clock. The film knows exactly which heartstrings it wants to pull, and it yanks every one of them.
Jennifer Carter and Solomon Chau meet, fall in love, and plan a wedding. Then Solomon gets a terminal cancer diagnosis. Their friends launch a crowdfunding campaign to pay for a wedding before he runs out of time. Marc Meyers builds the film around a single question. How fast can a romance race to the altar before death closes the door. The movie is not about love. It is about a deadline.
Jessica Rothe plays Jennifer with a brightness that the script keeps draining from her. She sells the early courtship scenes with real warmth and gives Jennifer a stubbornness that grounds the grief. Harry Shum Jr. plays Solomon as a chef and a romantic who stays gentle even as his body fails. The two of them generate genuine heat in the meet-cute and the cooking scenes. The problem is the screenplay strands them in a story that treats their relationship as a countdown clock rather than a partnership.
Marc Meyers directs from a script by Todd Rosenberg, and the seams show. The camera bathes every interior in golden light and soft focus, the visual grammar of a greeting card. The score swells on cue to instruct the audience when to cry. Meyers cuts the courtship into a montage of restaurant dates and rooftop kisses, then hits the diagnosis and slows everything to a crawl. The film engineers its emotions instead of earning them.
This is a movie that knows exactly which buttons it wants to push and pushes them without subtlety. Rothe and Shum deserve a script that trusts them to carry a scene without a string section underlining it. The supporting friends, played by Chrissie Fit and Michael Masini, exist only to organize the wedding and react to the tragedy. The film mistakes a sad situation for a story. It asks the audience to weep at the premise and forgets to write the people.