50 SMILES, 50 TEARS

Rating: 8/10 (11 November 2004)

After watching this film, I can't wait for the next Barrymore - Sadler pairing. Drew Barrymore and Adam Sadler although maybe not quite Liz Taylor and Richard Burton on screen are truly excellent together. I thought their pairing in The Wedding Singer was good but it is well surpassed in 50 First Dates.
Basically the film centres around Marine Biologist Henry Roth (Sadler) whose aim is to complete building his ship and set sail to study the Walrus and Lucy Whitmore (Barrymore) who has totally lost her short term memory as a result of a car accident caused by an errant cow. Needless to say Henry sees Lucy and the die is cast for a not quite so unusual love story.
There is certainly more than a glancing association with Groundhog Day, but for my money this enhanced the film.
Everyone played their parts extremely competently and the reason I called the summary 50 smiles, 50 tears is quite simply because the comedic action was performed subtly and well, even the slapstick. The same can be said about the tear jerking scenes also.
The icing on the cake of this film for me was the ending. Of course once we knew that Henry's aim was to get Lucy's short term memory back, it was a foregone conclusion that he would succeed and both he and Lucy would live happily ever after. But were we right? I was pleasantly surprised with the extremely well written and somewhat surprising ending.
All in all an extremely well written and thoughtful script, extremely well directed and acted on all fronts.
I have rated it 8/10 and would love to see it in my Christmas Stocking.