Review
UK – TLA Releasing (2012)
When it comes to break-ups, we all sometimes try to think about how we can win back the people we love. However, we don’t think that we would ever go to the lengths of telling our nearest and dearest that we are suffering from cancer just to get another shot in the sack with that special someone. This is the premise of The Love Patient and from its lacklustre opening to its pitiful conclusion you would be hard pressed for a reason to keep watching.
The central conflict is represented by Paul and Brad, a pair of attractive yet dull people who broke up for an unknown reason. Paul, being characterised as a selfish slacker type, finds himself unable to move on with his life and with the help of a friend in the medical profession decides to try and deceive his family and friends into believing he has cancer in an effort to bring him and his ex back together. The concept alone is enough to raise an eyebrow, but it is the clumsy execution that really takes this film beyond bad taste and makes it well and truly offensive.
In terms of the acting skills we have to hand, we were hard pressed to find one single person involved in this film who seemed to be able to display a real human emotion. We found ourselves thankful that the characters felt the need to explain their feelings and motivations at any given opportunity, because none of them were able to display it in any other way. In one particularly unpleasant early exchange where Paul is trying to convince his ex to have sex with him, we found ourselves squirming from pure embarassment. It made the main characters so intensely unrelatable that we find ourselves not caring about either of them, a critical flaw in a film that desperately wants you to empaphise with them. The film’s other major problem seemed to be its inability to define the characters as we were introduced to the obligatory cast of ‘zany relatives’. They all seemed to be made up of every stock stereotype imaginable from bitchy sister, to overbearing Jewish mother, to a new age hippy whose inclusion only serves to complicate the plot and muddy the already turgid waters.
The setting also left a lot to be desired. With almost all of the action being locked onto a handful of sets, you would expect there to have been a lot more care to make the setting seem more like a home environment. Instead, it came across as being sterile and coarse and didn’t have the ‘lived in’ quality you would expect to see in anyone’s home. Compared to the other problems this film suffers from this would probably seem quite a small point, but all it serves to do is to distract from what little investment you make in the characters, and gives the execution of the plot an even more artificial and clinical feel.
If one had to define this film, it would seem to be a farce, with its over exaggerated characters and highly improbable situations managing to fulfill the definition. However, the humour consistently falls flat and the film rather selfishly concludes by giving the characters exactly what they want. There is no sense of a lesson learned, and everyone seems to just accept the situation without any kind of redemption, and move on with their dim and selfish lives. After suffering through the clumsy narrative and the painful acting the anticlimax of a weak conclusion only adds salt to the festering wound.
All in all, The Love Patient is not a film that we would willingly watch again. We are not simply saying that this is a bad movie; frankly, we were not sure what this is, other than as an exercise in futility as the film wants so badly to make us care about its cast of larger than life characters. Unfortunately, it fails to do so. The film leave any lasting mark on the viewer, save perhaps from feeling that they have wasted a few hours of their lives that they will not be getting back.
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