50 First Dates

For this year’s Valentine’s Day, let’s take a look at the 2004 romantic comedy, “50 First Dates.” This is a spin on the “Groundhog’s Day” idea of a day that keeps repeating itself. However, this time the day keeps repeating in the head of Lucy Whitmore, played by Drew Barrymore, who was in an accident that caused short-term memory loss. Every night when she sleeps, her memory is lost, and when she wakes the next morning, she remembers everything that happened up to the accident, but nothing that happened afterward.

Is that possible. Roger Ebert said in his review, “I’d like to bring in Oliver Sacks for a second opinion. Seems to me that short-term memory loss doesn’t work on a daily timetable, but is more like the affliction of “10-Second Tom,” a character in the movie who reboots every 10 seconds (Allen Covert).”

Ebert continued, “Still, this isn’t a psychiatric docudrama but a lighthearted romantic comedy, and the premise works to provide Adam Sandler and Barrymore with a sweet story.” They work well together, as they demonstrated in “The Wedding Singer.” They have the same manner of smiling, modest sincerity.

The movie is somewhat an experiment for Sandler. He shows the warm side of his personality, and doesn’t include the aggression, anger, and gross-out humor. Ebert noted, “To be sure, there’s projectile vomiting on a vast scale in an opening scene of the movie, but it’s performed by a walrus, not one of the human characters, and the walrus feels a lot better afterward.” This is a nicer and gentler Adam Sandler.

Ebert noted, “He plays Henry Roth, a marine biologist at a Hawaiian sea world, healing walruses, sea lions and dolphins and moonlighting as an expert in one-night stands. He romances babes who are in Hawaii on vacation, and then forgets them when they go home, so imagine his amazement when he meets Lucy and finds that she forgets him every night.”

Lucy is surrounded by a lot of support (dad (Chet Hunter from “Boy Meets World,” Blake Clark), brother (Sean Astin), and the staff at the local diner (Amy Hill and Pomaika’i Brown)), and they’re doubtful about the ideas of this man who says he’s so much in love he’s wanting to start over with this woman every morning.

You’d think it would be hard to piece a part for a story that starts over every day, but George Wing’s screenplay intelligently uses a VHS to solve that problem – so that Lucy gets a recap every morning on what she has missed, and makes daily entries in a journal about her strange romance with Henry. Eventually this ends with a conclusion that it’s unfair to Henry to have to deal with her daily memory losses, and she says she wants to break up. Obviously, this is part of story, but how the movie solves it is somewhat charming.

The movie doesn’t have the intricacy and wisdom of “Groundhog Day” (Ebert said, “which I recently saw described as “the most spiritual film of our time””), but as entertainment it’s sycophantic and lovable. And it says that Sandler, whose movies are very often based on aggression, has another look, another voice, that plays very nicely.

I saw this on Netflix while I was exercising and I thought this was a good movie. Adam Sandler does get a lot of bad rep, but this one is actually one of the nicest films he has ever done. Check it out if you haven’t, you will love it, I promise. It is very fitting for Valentine’s Day.

Stay tuned later on for a review on “Black History Movie Month.”