The Vow

The Vow
Director: Michael Sucsy
Starring: Channing Tatum, Rachel McAdams, Sam Neill, Scott Speedman, Jessica Lange, Jessica McNamee

Briefly returning to the mushy material that helped make her a global star (with her former beau Ryan Gosling, in The Notebook), McAdams stars as the stuff of boyhood fantasy: an irresistibly cute, artsy city type named Paige. Fawning at her every step is the beefcake former model Tatum, as Paige's recording studio-owning husband, Leo. Together, they enjoy an idyllic, horrendously soppy life. All that is horrifically shattered by a car accident, which leaves Paige in a state of amnesia. Their four years together are suddenly wiped from her memory, leaving her to return to her estranged upper-crust parents (Neill and Lange) and her former life as squeaky-clean legal eagle-to-be. With her manipulative parents plotting to reunite her with her ex (Scott Speedman), Leo is soon at a loss as to what to do. Sucsy - best known for his award-winning HBO feature Grey Gardens, about Jackie Onassis's bizarre relatives Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier Beale – does well in relaying this fact-based tale without going overboard on schmaltz. (It's loosely based on the real-life couple Kim and Krickitt Carpenter's experience with a similar trauma.) True, The Vow never veers far from its heart-on-sleeve leanings, particularly with Tatum's overbearing voice-over, but McAdams is typically reliable, both as the adorable pre-crash Paige, then as the radically different post-crash apple of Daddy's eye. Both Tatum and McAdams have very different projects to follow (Tatum in Soderbergh's Magic Mike, McAdams in Terrence Malick's yet-to-come follow-up to The Tree of Life), suggesting this lovefest may well prove an oddity. A reasonable, if undemanding, weepie.