'Mitch Albom's For One More Day' tells it like it is -- sweet and sour
December 9, 2007
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic
It's easy for snarky people like me to ridicule love and hope, because they let us down all the damn time. Witness the beginning of "Mitch Albom's For One More Day." It starts with a man, alone and lost, placing a pistol to his temple. Love and hope failed him.
Will he shoot? Not if his mother can help it. She is dead. But she appears from the afterlife at the last moment so she can spend one more day with him. Her goal is to change how he views and breathes life.
It's a Scrooge story, the tale of a mother and son as told through conversations and flashbacks. The narrative is fine, beautifully directed by Lloyd Kramer, carefully edited and humanly acted.
And what Albom explores in his screenplay (based on his novella of the same title) is startlingly convincing: Don't love the wrong people the wrong way. Love the right people, those who truly love you back, the right way.
This is where I would usually kick into snarky high gear. Fictions concerned with a "love can save us all" mentality often are presented with too much cardboard schmaltz to take seriously, even if "love can save us all" is true.
But "For One More Day" (an "Oprah Winfrey Presents" film, like his earlier hit, "Tuesdays With Morrie") knows bad love doesn't cut it. In Charley's case, his dad loved him the wrong way, through bitter dictatorship and recrimination. His mom Posey loved him the right way, with wise, if imperfect, tender actions.
Early in Charley's childhood, Dad and Mom divorced, and he obeyed his harsh father, who convinced him his mother's kindness was weak. (Charley is played by Michael Imperioli as an adult and by his son, Vadim Imperioli, as a kid in flashbacks.)
"No sympathy for losers," young Charley's dad (Scott Cohen) says, speaking like a fearful loser.
It isn't until his mother appears like a ghost that he comes to see her strength for the first time. (The older Posey is played by Ellen Burstyn; the younger flashback Posey is played by Samantha Mathis.)
It is this point I wish viewers would embrace most. People who are honest and good and kind are not weak. They are the strong ones. The ones who seem strong by trying to imprint their twisted idea of love on you are the weak losers.
You can tell the difference between the two by judging people by their actions, not their words. It's nice to hear "I love you." It's realer to feel it warmly.
Charley thinks he feels love from his dad, because his dad is intent on shaping his son. He wants Charley to play baseball all the time, tells him not to grow up to be "ordinary," criticizes Charley's mother and worse.
As an adult, Charley walks his dad's course and defends his father, which leads to trouble.
If you watch "For One More Day," you may find yourself asking: Who have I been defending who doesn't deserve it? And who have I been taking for granted who deserves better love?
As a critic of sappiness, I don't think you'll find it sappy. It's saved by a quiet, complex tone and structure, which mirrors a person's real life much better than the average TV movie.
That tone gives thoughtfulness to cliched truisms from the mom, statements that sound like things a cognitive behavioral therapist might say.
"Sometimes children want you to hurt the way they do," she tells Charley after his daughter doesn't invite him to her wedding.
And she says of his disastrous life, "Things can be fixed, you know."
A life really can be fixed, especially if you're a healthy American with enough money and brains, which Charley is and has.
(Or as someone said wisely in the movie "I Heart Huckabees," "Everything you could ever want or be, you already have and are.")
Yet Charley went sour too often, like his dad. When he grows incredulous that his dead mother is talking to him, he stresses to her this cannot be, because she expired years before.
"Oh Charley," she says softly. "You make too much of things."
I love that. He does make too much of things. He had a great life, yet lived not lightly enough. Then he lost love and hope, his parents, his marriage and his daughter's love.
But did he "lose" them? Some things you lose. Other things, you throw away but think you lost.
delfman@suntimes.com
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic
It's easy for snarky people like me to ridicule love and hope, because they let us down all the damn time. Witness the beginning of "Mitch Albom's For One More Day." It starts with a man, alone and lost, placing a pistol to his temple. Love and hope failed him.
Will he shoot? Not if his mother can help it. She is dead. But she appears from the afterlife at the last moment so she can spend one more day with him. Her goal is to change how he views and breathes life.
It's a Scrooge story, the tale of a mother and son as told through conversations and flashbacks. The narrative is fine, beautifully directed by Lloyd Kramer, carefully edited and humanly acted.
And what Albom explores in his screenplay (based on his novella of the same title) is startlingly convincing: Don't love the wrong people the wrong way. Love the right people, those who truly love you back, the right way.
This is where I would usually kick into snarky high gear. Fictions concerned with a "love can save us all" mentality often are presented with too much cardboard schmaltz to take seriously, even if "love can save us all" is true.
But "For One More Day" (an "Oprah Winfrey Presents" film, like his earlier hit, "Tuesdays With Morrie") knows bad love doesn't cut it. In Charley's case, his dad loved him the wrong way, through bitter dictatorship and recrimination. His mom Posey loved him the right way, with wise, if imperfect, tender actions.
Early in Charley's childhood, Dad and Mom divorced, and he obeyed his harsh father, who convinced him his mother's kindness was weak. (Charley is played by Michael Imperioli as an adult and by his son, Vadim Imperioli, as a kid in flashbacks.)
"No sympathy for losers," young Charley's dad (Scott Cohen) says, speaking like a fearful loser.
It isn't until his mother appears like a ghost that he comes to see her strength for the first time. (The older Posey is played by Ellen Burstyn; the younger flashback Posey is played by Samantha Mathis.)
It is this point I wish viewers would embrace most. People who are honest and good and kind are not weak. They are the strong ones. The ones who seem strong by trying to imprint their twisted idea of love on you are the weak losers.
You can tell the difference between the two by judging people by their actions, not their words. It's nice to hear "I love you." It's realer to feel it warmly.
Charley thinks he feels love from his dad, because his dad is intent on shaping his son. He wants Charley to play baseball all the time, tells him not to grow up to be "ordinary," criticizes Charley's mother and worse.
As an adult, Charley walks his dad's course and defends his father, which leads to trouble.
If you watch "For One More Day," you may find yourself asking: Who have I been defending who doesn't deserve it? And who have I been taking for granted who deserves better love?
As a critic of sappiness, I don't think you'll find it sappy. It's saved by a quiet, complex tone and structure, which mirrors a person's real life much better than the average TV movie.
That tone gives thoughtfulness to cliched truisms from the mom, statements that sound like things a cognitive behavioral therapist might say.
"Sometimes children want you to hurt the way they do," she tells Charley after his daughter doesn't invite him to her wedding.
And she says of his disastrous life, "Things can be fixed, you know."
A life really can be fixed, especially if you're a healthy American with enough money and brains, which Charley is and has.
(Or as someone said wisely in the movie "I Heart Huckabees," "Everything you could ever want or be, you already have and are.")
Yet Charley went sour too often, like his dad. When he grows incredulous that his dead mother is talking to him, he stresses to her this cannot be, because she expired years before.
"Oh Charley," she says softly. "You make too much of things."
I love that. He does make too much of things. He had a great life, yet lived not lightly enough. Then he lost love and hope, his parents, his marriage and his daughter's love.
But did he "lose" them? Some things you lose. Other things, you throw away but think you lost.
delfman@suntimes.com
Comments