I'm a sucker for the 'What If?' scenario. Which means that love stories that hit the hardest (for me) usually play into that theme. So, yes, this Valentine's Day or in the orbit of Valentine's Day I will be seeing Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum in The Vow. Based on previews only, the film is about a married couple that gets in a car accident. The wife loses her memories from the last five years which means she thinks she's engaged to another man and has never met her current husband. Awkward! Her husband takes the rest of the movie to get his wife to fall in love with him all over again. Cheesy, I know. I don't even care.
Though Kaufman would probably disagree (he should), the movie reminded me of one of my favorite movies (romantic or otherwise), The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This movie is a kind of disguised love story. Joel and Clementine are lovers, but when they meet they have no idea since they both had their memories of each other removed. The film inter cuts between the breadth of their relationship and breakup, specifically transporting the viewer into Joel's memories as midway through his memory wipe he gets cold feet.
Joel travels through his memories with Clementine as each one is taken away and he realizes that even if he is miserable now, even though the relationship brought him so much pain, he'd rather have that than a void of nothing. Does that make love true? When you're willing to keep the bad just so you can hold on to the memory of the good?
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