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It would probably be glib to refer to “Love of Your Life” as “Grieve Pray Love.” Rachel Morrison’s film about COVID-era loss, recovery and renewal is serious in intent and earnest in execution, grounded by a performance
of intelligence and emotional transparency by Margaret Qualley, and doesn’t deserve that kind of easy dismissal. But the temptation is there. It’s hard not to think a little bit of Elizabeth Gilbert’s globe-trotting memoir “Eat Pray Love,” the epitome of breezy Noughties self-help entertainment, not to mention Ryan Murphy’s vapid, glowingly shot film adaptation, when watching this story of a bereaved young woman’s long-term recuperation via perfectly picturesque travels in Lisbon, London, Tokyo and beyond. There’s certainly much to be said for literal escape as a healing strategy, but Morrison’s permanently luminous film too often feels like a magazine spread about that process.
For viewers after a grownup romantic drama with equal, counterbalancing side servings of tearjerking trauma and glossy wish-fulfillment, “Love of Your Life” will handsomely suffice, and ought to rack up considerable streaming numbers when it hits Prime Video on Oct. 14, one month after its Toronto festival premiere. Amazon MGM Studios will also give it a brief theatrical release ahead of that date, but despite the soothing eye-bath of its protagonist’s well-curated world tour, the film never feels altogether cinematic: It’s as attractively mounted as you’d expect from cinematographer-turned-director Morrison (Oscar-nominated for her lensing of “Mudbound”) and her own chosen DP Todd Benhazl (“Hustlers”), but their radiant, exactingly lit images don’t collectively accrue much meaning or power; the film plods through its eight-year timeline with efficient linearity but no particular rhythm.
There’s life inside it, though, and that’s largely thanks to Qualley, a reliably curious and open-hearted actor who can imbue even quite a vaguely drawn character — like the one that screenwriter Julia Cox (“Nyad”) hands her here — with some sense of a soul. When we meet 26-year-old Maya (Qualley), completing a Craigslist purchase of a bedside table from instantly smitten academic Charlie (Gabriel Basso, still in recovery from playing J.D. Vance in “Hillbilly Energy”), she’s barely anybody at all: a nurse, in Boston, with no family she’s willing to mention, and no life outside her grueling hospital shifts. Qualley locates defensive purpose in Maya’s stiff reserve, and an errant gleam of joy when Charlie’s dorky come-ons actually do the job.
Before long, they’ve moved in together, setting up a perfectly boho-chic love nest in their Victorian apartment. Not too much later, they spring a surprise wedding on their loved ones, to the unspoken but visible consternation of Charlie’s world-weary mom Ruth (ensemble MVP Catherine Keener), and broach the possibility of starting a family — something Maya had always sworn off doing. And all too soon after that, a certain global pandemic strikes, and the worst thing that can happen to our heroine, well, happens. Plunged into the lightless tunnel vision of debilitating grief, she spurns the company of Ruth and longtime best friend Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger, in a thankless part) and abruptly skips town before anyone can so much as trouble her with funeral arrangements. It’s a selfish trauma response that Qualley, seemingly body-slammed and hollowed-out with pain, makes almost rational.
Everything that happens from this point on in “Love of Your Life,” however, is considerably harder to swallow. We lurch forward a couple of years to find Maya — now 31 years old, aggressively kohl-eyed and constantly smoking — skulking the gorgeous streets of Lisbon, finding little emotional relief or release in its exquisite painted tiles and pasteis de nata, though plentiful cheap vinho verde is evidently some comfort. But when she meets cute with Felix (Aaron Pierre), an absurdly good-looking touring Brit, she embraces the possibility of romance again, following him first to a Condé Nast-ready holiday home in rural Portugal, and then back to his well-appointed life in West London, complete with adorable young daughter. (He’s a doting single dad on great terms with the girl’s mom, lest you fear this impossible dreamboat may have even a whisper of a character flaw.)
None of this even remotely resembles real life, which makes Maya’s emotional recovery increasingly hard to map: We learn in passing that she’s somehow funding these extended, luxurious travels with a career segue into telehealth, and when her online therapist observes that “we’re really getting somewhere,” we just have to take her word for it. Cox’s script, meanwhile, trades increasingly in one-size-fits-all therapy speak, and despite Qualley’s natural sincerity as a performer, Maya seems steadily less specific a personality as the years pass.
Late in proceedings, “Love of Your Life” gets a welcome jolt of feeling and truth from a scene that reunites Maya with Ruth, beautifully played by Keener with all the shattered, visible exhaustion of a woman who hasn’t got to nurture her grief in the Algarve sun. As she unpacks her damage, frankly but no longer angrily, against the unphotogenic greige backdrop of her house’s timber siding, “Love of Your Life” finally reconnects with reality, and not a moment too soon.
