Nate At The Movies

I’m sorry, I raced to the theater from school this afternoon for this? With Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson at the helm, I figured that Die My Love would be an easy win, but this film instead became one of the few examples of a bad movie with multiple outstanding performances.

Simply put, the story and subtext of the movie just never came together for me. I’m always game for underlying meaning, but not when I can’t find it! There was clearly some message under the surface of Grace and Jackson’s crumbling relationship, and the two leads tried their best to deliver it to me, but I was either too disinterested or too confused to grasp it.

While there were a few huge (and startlingly loud) events in the narrative, I was pretty bored for most of the film’s runtime, and those jumps weren’t enough to bring me back in. There were also numerous details and moments that I couldn’t figure out the purposes of. What was the horse about? Was LaKeith Stanfield’s character real or a figment of Grace’s imagination? These are the questions.

The single aspect of the movie that really had the juice, though, was the lead performances. I’ve not seen nearly enough of Jennifer Lawrence’s filmography, but this felt like a career-best outing. There were moments of hers that made me physically uncomfortable, and while they didn’t help out the narrative, they were technically quite impressive. I’ve heard tell that Lawrence won’t get a nom for this, and I think that’s ludicrous. Robert Pattinson also gave a great performance, and I think the lighting in this movie made him look the most like his Twilight self since those films came out. That had literally no bearing on the performance; I just wanted to mention it.

Die My Love was a big disappointment in the worst way. There are some bad movies that make poor choices that I don’t like, and then there are bad movies that can’t keep my attention. Die My Love was surprisingly the second, which was all the more shocking considering how J-Law and Pattinson held their scenes down. Maybe it’s that I don’t want to go to the theater to watch a couple deal with their problems; where’s the suspension of disbelief?