Margaret Qualley makes Amazon MGM’s new romantic drama worth watching. This is an actress who consistently becomes more fascinating it seems with each role, and as Maya in Love Of Your Life she plays a woman who finds love, loses it, faces extreme grief, wanders the world , and only comes back when she learns to fall in love again, this time with herself.
I found this film to be one of several parts, all involving this young woman’s search for meaning, a choice she made although she could have been suicidal after a dream romance and marriage turns terribly tragic. Instead she puts everything she has into two suitcases, throws out her phone, and drops out of sight as director Rachel Morrison‘s handsomely shot film (Todd Banhazi is the cinematographer) keeps us questioning her judgment to leave everything behind.
In a way I wasn’t surprised to see Ryan Gosling is a producer on this, and his production company Open Invite instantly optioned the script. It could be summed up succinctly as The Notebook meets Eat Pray Love, but Morrison and Julia Cox’s (Nyad) screenplay give it its own alternating rhythms. Though I found it meandering at times, it always kept me engaged and that is all due to Qualley’s undeniable screen presence.
Maya is an ER nurse in a busy Boston hospital. The first half hour of the film is a romcom with a lot of familiar beats as she meets Charlie (an engaging Gabriel Basso), dates him, falls in love, has a flash wedding with friends and skeptical family, plans a life together, and then suddenly, cruelly it all comes crashing down. Indications of this are when Covid starts to overwhelm the hospital and Maya is in the center of this horrific pandemic. Connected to this is Charlie who becomes ill, doesn’t worry at first, but soon starts failing. Maya, in the midst of all these emergencies at work, begins to fear the worst and tries desperately to find him help. He dies. Her life is shattered.
The story then skips forward a few years. Maya has changed. She is now an ex-pat living in Lisbon, wandering around this beautiful city but with no real connection to it or who she has become. Her unbearable grief drove her to drop out without warning, without notice, nothing. It is here she meets another loner, albeit one with a child, Felix (Aaron Pierre) , a handsome good man with whom she cautiously strikes up a relationship. But is this the new love of her life? At this moment in time they have an emotional need for each other, no doubt, but this is the same woman who left everything behind once, and could do it again. Her takes her to England. An awkward encounter with her one time BFF Jason, just passing through town, says it all. Maya isn’t the person she once was. Jason, now living in New Orleans, is perplexed. She doesn’t even seem to know him.
The globe trotting film hits London, New Orleans in an attempt to renew her friendship with Jason, and back to Cape Cod and a key reunion with Charlie’s mother Ruth (Catherine Keener) who had desperately tried to contact Maya to no end as Charlie was dying. The themes Morrison and Cox have been playing with will all come into place in a movie that asks for patience as it slowly unfolds to reveal some heartbreaking truths about what is most important in life.
Qualley holds this all together with a tricky performance that sometimes is actually alienating. You wonder who is this woman that could be so self -centered as to just pick up and disappear, no forwarding address , no clues. She just drops out, for years. That she manages to gain our sympathy is a bit of a miracle, but Qualley makes Maya human, and ultimately I could buy her journey, one that was the result of deep deep grief and loss, the loss of herself.
In the supporting cast Basso makes us believe this guarded woman really had found the love of her life, while Pierre does a version of that as well. Keener only is in a couple of scenes but she has a killer one near the end that is best in show.
For Morrison, a sterling cinematographer (Mudbound, Black Panther) turned director with 2024’s fine female boxing film, The Fire Inside here meets that promise and delivers an emotionally rich drama that should have appeal, particularly to the underserved female audience just pining for this kind of movie once again. It had its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival tonight.
Cast: Margaret Qualley, Gabriel Basso, Aaron Pierre, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Catherine Keener
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