Forever My Girl: Too pat, too perfect, too predictable

A better incarnation of Forever My Girl could be a Valentine's Day special on the Hallmark channel. The film licks at you like you're some kind of cloying cake batter eaten straight from the bowl.

Can you be uplifted and deflated at the same time? This film says yes you can.

High school golden couple Liam Page (Alex Roe) and Josie Preston (Jessica Rothe) tarnish before the vows take place as he heads out for fame and fortune on the country music circuit. Eight years later, he’s back — now a world-famous recording artist (really? discovered in a karaoke bar? why did that never work for me?) — returning to the Southern roots he severed and the covered bridges he burned. Emotional reconnections swim and swirl in what's supposed to be a heartwarming ballad of redemption and second chances.

Along with Roe (Hot Summer Nights, The 5th Wave) and Rothe (Happy Death Day, La La Land), other performers include Abby Ryde Fortson (Ant-Man, “Transparent”), country music star and Grammy winner Travis Tritt (Fire Down Below, Brother’s Keeper), and John Benjamin Hickey (Flags of Our Fathers, the Bone Collector). Original songs and score are by Jackson Odell and Brett Boyett, who also scored Mr. Right, Bad Kids of Crestview Academy and Texas Chainsaws 3D — among others.

The film is directed by Bethany Ashton Wolf from a script she adapted from best-selling USA Today author Heidi McLaughlin’s novel by the same title. McLauglin's own words say it best as Liam thinks out loud: “I was never supposed to be a rock star. I had my life all planned out for me. Play football in college. Go to the NFL. Marry my high school sweetheart and live happily ever after. I broke both our hearts that day when I told her I was leaving. I was young. I made the right decision for me, but the wrong decision for us. I’ve poured my soul into my music, but I’ve never forgotten her. Her smell, her smile. And now I’m going back. After 10 years. I hope I can explain that after all this time. I still want her to be my forever girl.”

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The film is like the love child of a Nicholas Sparks romance novel and a painting by the artist-of-light Thomas Kinkade. Enduring it was like drowning in harmony and nauseating goodness. 

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This dialogue could just as well be a voiceover for a shampoo or teeth whitener commercial, maybe to accompany the small-screen Lifetime TV broadcast where this film belongs.

But since it's big screen, the moment Josie says, with no conviction whatsoever, “Nothing’s gonna happen between us, Liam,” just lie back in your multiplex recliner and let the magnolia drench your senses as you stuff your face with Milk Duds. 

The film is shot in shimmering hues with golden tones throughout, accented by pops of lavender, amber, rose, and as the press kit describes it,  “watermelon sunrises, violet dusks, vermillion sunsets.”  We all know that in small towns, folks sit on their front porches in their porch swings and watch the fading light cast shadows of the potted ferns against the white columns. Gilded morning light, moonlit skies, and a purple and lavender magic-hour as the sun sets in the west guide the way through a pat and perfect life that's barely punctuated by any real drama.

The film is like the love child of a Nicholas Sparks romance novel and a painting by the artist-of-light Thomas Kinkade. Enduring it was like drowning in harmony and nauseating goodness. 

It’s being advertised as a love story to small towns and country music — and marketed to church groups and garden clubs — so we get our share of precocious kids, colorful picnics, front porches with the requisite American flag, cute downtowns with well-scrubbed storefronts (think Micanopy), and a gentle dollop of country-lite lyrics about watering down your whiskey while smokin' and cryin'. I don’t recall a single Hell or Damn, not a single unchaste kiss, barely a hint of post-concert groupie-sex, but hardly a reference at all to the sweaty fumbling between the football player and cheerleader eight years ago that starts the predictable plot in motion. 

I was reminded of the old joke — George Carlin? no, Garrison Keillor — questioning whether it’s really premarital sex if you have sex but don’t get married.

Country roads, take me home. The sheen of kudzu and Spanish moss hangs over every scene. It's an appropriate metaphor for a suffocating asphyxiation. By the end of the movie you've been smothered like having your head shoved into the deep pillows of a feather bed at a froufrou B&B in Helen, Georgia. 

The big giveaway prize to the preview audience I attended was a massive four-foot teddy bear, soft and sweet, cute and cuddly — like the movie itself — but a gift stuffed with polyester fiber and shredded foam filler.

Enough said. 

This article appears in Jan 18-25, 2018.