Miss You Already

Miss You Already might just as easily have been called BFF because that’s what it was. No spoiler alerts here because it went predictably from life to death, through thick and thin, from first to last, from good to bad, with plenty of tears along the way and a few good chuckles although not many and no laugh out-louds. According to Rotten Tomatoes, the viewers liked it better than the critics—82% to 66 %. I guess I’d side with the critics. It was good enough to see but not to remember. Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette are lifelong friends in London, English Milly and American Jess, with Milly impregnated by her businessman hippie Kit (Dominic Cooper), who marries her and loses his hippiedom, and Jess marrying her oil rigger boyfriend Jago (Paddy Considine) but unable to get pregnant. The whole thing is so symmetrical. Pre-middle age Milly is told she has breast cancer and will need to go through chemo. And Jess and Milly’s mother (Jacqueline Bissett) and the viewers go through it with her, in all its ugliness. She loses her hair and finds that the chemo hasn’t worked. She then has a double mastectomy, losing both breasts as well as her sexuality (at least she thinks so when her husband Kit can no longer perform). Meanwhile, Jess and Jago, after many fertility tests and procedures, are successful and Jess gets bigger and bigger as Milly gets uglier and uglier. Amazing how Toni Collete, who is an odd looker to begin with, could look so attractive and sexy at first and so unattractive at last. The plot comes full circle with the birth of Jess’s baby and Milly’s demise. See, no spoiler alert necessary because we all saw it coming from the very beginning of the movie. As I said, it’s worth seeing but not worth remembering.