107 min | PG | July 31, 2020 | Roadside Attractions
A widowed mother of three meets a mysterious handyman who believes the universe gives you what you think about. He fixes her roof and rewires her optimism. The Secret turns a self-help bestseller into a feature-length affirmation.
Miranda Wells is a widow raising three kids in New Orleans on a tight budget and a long string of small disasters. A storm knocks out the power. A tree falls on her car. Then a stranger named Bray Johnson arrives with a manila envelope and a philosophy that bad things stop happening once you change how you think. The film adapts Rhonda Byrne’s self-help phenomenon, and its real subject is the doctrine of positive visualization itself. Every plot turn exists to prove that wanting something hard enough makes it appear.
Katie Holmes plays Miranda as a woman worn thin by responsibility and braced for the next blow. She holds the tension in her shoulders and lets the warmth leak out slowly. Josh Lucas plays Bray with a soft Southern calm that never breaks, which is the problem. Bray has no doubt, no edge, and no interior life, so Lucas has nothing to push against. Jerry O’Connell plays Tucker Wells, Miranda’s smooth fiance, as the obstacle the script needs and discards. Celia Weston plays Bobby, the mother-in-law, with the only spine in the house.
Andy Tennant directs from a script he wrote with Bekah Brunstetter and Rick Parks, and the staging matches the message. The cinematography bathes the Louisiana settings in warm gold light that flattens every scene into the same comfortable glow. Storms arrive and pass without raising the stakes because the camera already promises everything works out. The score swells on cue to tell you when to feel hopeful. Tennant directs romance well in other films. Here the structure forbids conflict, so he has nothing to direct.
The Secret asks the audience to accept that gratitude pays the mortgage and good vibrations repair a car. It dramatizes a worldview that cannot fail because it blames any failure on insufficient belief. That makes for a closed loop and a dead drama. The result is pleasant, weightless, and built to confirm what its target audience already paid to hear.