An emotional ride taking a serious subject a little too lightly

Rating: 6/10 (6 July 2016)

I Went to the movies recently and saw Me Before You, the film based on the novel with the same name by the author Jojo Moyes. It is about the eccentric girl Louisa Clark who lives in an English village with her working class family. After getting fired from the small café she works in, she desperately accepts employment as a caretaker of the paralyzed young man Will Traynor. He is a wealthy ex business man who got paralyzed when he got hit by a motorcycle. Will is bitter and unpleasant towards everything and everyone around him. Me Before You is directed by the relatively unknown Thea Sharrock and this is her first feature film. Emilia Clarke, known from Game of Thrones plays Louisa and Sam Claflin, mostly known from The Hunger Games series, portrays the paralyzed Will.
First I want to say that Me Before You is really a British film. Working class meet upper class, they clash and break down social barriers. I also think that Louisa is a pretty typical British "film girl". She wears extremely colorful clothes, is constantly happy, a bit weird and often quite oblivious to the serious situations around her. When she meets Will it is at first very tense, he mostly ignores her and she desperately wants to get out of there. They of course soon become attracted to each other because they really are each other's opposites. She is fascinated by his world, his personally and also in my opinion a bit by his disability. She in turn for him becomes a happy, clumsy and carefree girl like no one he ever met before in his organized and sterile world.
The director Thea Sharrock relies very much on close-ups and reaction shots. This is good, and sometimes not so good. Too much close-ups on a face can easily remove the body language and also make us interpret every single facial expression as something very important. Sometimes we stay to long on Louisa's face. Her smile and her tilted gaze always seems to want to say something and I wonder if that really is what they were aiming for. However they succeed very well in a certain face shaving scene I consider as one of the best ones in the film.
Me Before You is a very heavy film and touches a very sensitive subject that shall remain unknown because it is a major spoiler. I do think that the filmmakers take this too lightly and offer a very simple answer that in reality should be a lot more complicated. Also, the film doesn't go all the way and actually chicken out during what I believe was a very defining moment. A bit weak actually. But the film and especially the author should have credit for daring to speak about it. The overall impression is that they actually manage to finish the film in the way they planned. Our entire emotional register is played out during these barely two hours. We laugh, we get angry, confused and we cry. Not a dry eye in the theater. But for me to become more involved and drawn to the story, it would require more focus on the sensitive subject. Offer no direct answers, ask us the audience questions and let us sit by the end of the film with our heads filled with thoughts. That would according to me have given the film more depth. Also the clichés and the music would have to be toned down. The music was at times very bombastic and tiresome.
David Lindahl - www.filmografen.se