The Vow | Film review

It would take willful memory loss to mistake The Vow’s romantic scenario for a novel one—and a heart of stone not to recognize its appeal. Though supposedly based on a real incident, the film resembles both Regarding Henry and 50 First Dates in its story of Paige (Rachel McAdams), a Chicago sculptor who bangs her head in a car accident and awakes with no recollection of the last half-decade of her life. The man sitting bedside is Leo (Channing Tatum), a bleary-eyed hunk who claims to be her husband. Naturally, this whole amnesia business throws a serious wrench into the couple’s happy marriage. He has to make the girl of his dreams fall for him all over again. She has to reconcile the person she thinks she is with the person her mystery hubby describes. That, and stifle the urge to flee every time this total stranger starts gushing at her.

Cornball to its core, The Vow makes multiple missteps, from the Crash-like voiceover it forces on Tatum—there’s lots of talk about a metaphorical “moment of collision”—to the way director Michael Sucsy uses tourist-friendly Chicago scenery to gussy up flashbacks of the couple’s banal-boho courtship. (The film begins outside the Music Box before making stops under Cloud Gate and inside the Art Institute.) None of that can quite spoil the basic premise, though, especially once it becomes clear that Leo is competing with the ghosts of Paige’s past, including estranged parents (Sam Neill and Jessica Lange) and a former fiancé (Scott Speedman), all of whom see her accident as a chance to rewrite history. In its best moments, The Vow speaks to the sea change of early adulthood; without memories of her college years, Paige can’t fathom how she went from a buttoned-up, suburban law student to a tattooed city artist.

Appropriately dazed and confused, McAdams invests this paperback-grade material with the same charm and conviction she lent the similarly high-concept The Time Traveler’s Wife. Tatum, meanwhile, is endearingly miscast—a lunkhead learning to feel. Thanks to the leads, it’s easy to forgive, if not forget, the soggier side of this Valentine’s Day weepie.