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michaelgm
Reviews
When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story (2010)
Movie needed an intervention
After I watched this eagerly awaited, but ultimately disappointing film, one of my first thoughts was that this film needed its own version of Al-Anon. Lois Wilson, like many spouses of users, spent all of her energies dealing with the fall-out of living with an alcoholic; did the movie have to do the same thing? When one has less than two hours to tell a complex story about a fascinating woman, did we really need an hour and twenty or thirty minutes of the constant cycle of dankness, shame, recriminations, and broken promises? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure this harrowing cycle repeats itself in every user's home--it's just that when there was so little time to tell such a complicated story, I would have preferred less binges and more character development. I didn't get a good sense of what drew these two together in the first place. There were so few scenes other than those of "saintly wife props up troubled husband," that I just didn't get a sense of them as a married couple. I didn't feel Pepper and Ryder had that much chemistry together. Since much was made of the fact that the real Lois Wilson was 3 or 4 years older than Bill, it didn't help the situation to cast an actress with such a youthful persons with an actor who always looked appreciably older than her--and, yes, I know drink ages you, but he looked a lot older than her at the wedding. Hallmark seems to have lost its mojo.
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