Review: 'Reminders of Him' centers on a grieving ex-con in a romantic weepie that never feels authentic
Fans of Colleen Hoover — the novelist who has turned generational trauma into airport-ready reading material, like “It Ends With Us” and “Regretting You” — will likely latch onto this new movie adaptation, the romantic weepie “Reminders of Him,” even as its many cliches don’t mix into anything cohesive.
Our heroine is Kenna Rowan (played by Maika Monroe), who’s back in her home town of Laramie, Wyoming, after six years in prison. She was sentenced to seven, for vehicular manslaughter, but got time off for good behavior. She gets a fleabag apartment and must secure a job to pay for the rent, which she manages to do only after a day of rejection.
For a hard luck case, Kenna manages to luck into some beneficial situations. For example, she walks into a bar because it used to be a bookstore where she and her boyfriend, Scotty (played in flashbacks by Rudy Pankow), used to hang out. The bar’s owner is Ledger (Tyriq Winters), who was Scotty’s best friend growing up — but Kenna never met him during her and Scotty’s courtship.
The second Kenna realizes the bar owner is Ledger, she gets out of there. We soon find out the reason why: Kenna went to prison because of her role in Scotty’s death. What’s more, Kenna was pregnant at the time, and has never seen her 5-year-old daughter, Diem (Zoe Kosovic), who lives with Scotty’s parents, Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford). Ledger lives across the street from Diem’s grandparents, and is a surrogate uncle to her. And none of them want Kenna coming around, for fear she’ll try to take Diem away.
Kenna, though, is trying to do things the right way, earning her way back into society and, eventually, into custody of her daughter. That effort gets complicated, first by attempts to stay out of sight of Grace and Patrick — and, since this is a Colleen Hoover book, by romantic sparks with the hunky Ledger.
Director Vanessa Caswill — who directed some of the 2017 “Little Women” miniseries with Maya Hawke as Jo — understands the assignment. That’s to bring together characters who are broken, yet impossibly good-looking, for cathartic confrontations and and some safely PG-13 sex scenes. The problem is the script, by Hoover and co-writer Lauren Levine, which puts the actors in situations that only happen in bad movies that bear no resemblance to real life.
Winters is an appealing male lead, as he tries to give some weight to scenes where he’s asked mostly to take off his shirt. And Monroe, whose best-known credits are in horror (“It Follows,” “Watcher,” “Longlegs”), shows a bit of range as the tearful heroine in a romantic drama. Their charms carry “Reminders of Him” a bit farther than the material does, but not that far.
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‘Reminders of Him’
★★1/2
Opens Friday, March 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, strong language, drug content, some violent content, and brief partial nudity. Running time: 114 minutes.