Have I ever told you that I have a secret desire to be a film editor? Well, I do. I pick apart movies I watch, thinking how I would have done it, had it been up to me. Occasionally I’ll just enjoy a movie on its own merits, and occasionally a movie will really bother me and cause me to hiss and spit. “Only Love” was one of the latter.
Now, don’t get me wrong – the movie had a lot of good points, and that’s why I’m even bothering to review it. It’s just that it was poorly constructed and confusing. But we’ll walk through that together. We’ll hold hands and we’ll be okay.
Rob Morrow plays a doctor by the name of Michael Hiller. He is a successful neurosurgeon and has been called to treat an old girlfriend of his, Sylvia Rinaldi (Mathilda May). He explains to her that he thinks he may be able to help, and then we take a flashback to see how they first met.
Michael is a new doctor and is planning a trip to Africa. Along with other doctors, he will set up temporary clinics and treat as many people as they can before they have to leave. Politically, the tensions have been high and it’s not a safe climate, but he wants to go. Sylvia is another doctor on the trip, and they fall in love and begin an affair. They decide to marry, but they are ambushed by some guerilla-types with machine guns, and he is shot in the head. In order to save his life, Sylvia phones her rich father and asks him to send a helicopter to fly Michael to Rome for surgery. Her father makes her a deal – he’ll send the helicopter if she’ll leave the mission and agree to marry the man her father has selected. She agrees, to save Michael’s life.
After her wedding, Michael goes into a deep funk. His good friend from college, Evie, (Marisa Tomei) tries to cheer him up, but he’s still deeply in love with Sylvia. As time goes by, Evie’s marriage falls apart, and she and Michael meet up again, this time to realize how perfect they are for each other. (Well, I knew that from the first of the movie.) They get married, and that’s where we are when Sylvia reappears on the scene.
Evie knows that Michael is treating the woman who so deeply hurt him, and she’s concerned for their marriage. Sylvia tells Michael she wants him back and tries to seduce him, but he decides to leave, just in time to see Sylvia fall to the floor. He takes her to the hospital, where she finally succumbs to death. Michael returns home, deeply sorrowful, but ready to recommit himself totally to Evie.
The movie had some nice themes, but they were carried out far too long. I would have liked to see less of them walking through airports and more of them treating the sick African children, for instance. I would have liked a lot fewer bed scenes (like, a lot) and more about the relationships themselves. Additionally, we flipped back and forth between the present and the past so frequently, we often didn’t know where we were, and I was starting to get a little dizzy. Give me a nice, sequential movie any day.
The movie was made for television, meaning that it wasn’t rated, but I would give it a PG-13 because of the bed scenes. However, there’s not a lot of language or other content, so if you blip through the bed scenes, it would be a PG. You’ll also discover that Emmy Rossum has a small role as Evie’s daughter – it was fun to see her so young.
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