“Reminders of Him” is one of the most unfussy soap-operatic weepers I’ve seen at the movies in some time. It’s the latest adaptation of a novel by Colleen Hoover (who co-wrote the screenplay), and to the extent that her brand — at least, as it translates to the big screen — has been defined by the sleight-of-hand emotional power of “It Ends with Us” or the grandiose convolutions of last year’s “Regretting You,” I expected another full-throttle round of overripe passion. But “Reminders of Him” is notably restrained — a good thing more than not, even if the film does get a bit languid at times. It tells its story without making us feel used.
The heroine, Kenna (Maika Monroe), has just served seven years in prison for manslaughter, following the tragic car accident in which her beloved boyfriend, Scotty (Rudy Pankow), was killed. (She was at the wheel, had alcohol in her system, and left him alive at the scene of the crash.) In prison, she learned she was pregnant — but her infant daughter was taken away and raised by Scotty’s parents. She has lost all legal rights to the little girl, Diem (Zoe Kosivic), who is now five years old.
Maika Monroe, who plays Kenna, has a sorrowful vibrance that reminded me of Helen Hunt, and she’s such a sympathetic presence that the movie sets up a primal tug in the audience. Simply put, we want to see this mother reunited with her daughter. How could we not? Watching “Reminders of Him,” the audience is convinced that there’s something wrong with a legal system that imprisons a woman for an accident like this one, only to say (after she has paid her dues): You have no right to see your daughter. Ever.
Set in the cozy Western town of Laramie, Wyoming, the film seems to be setting up melodramatic situations like branches of timber that will soon catch fire. There’s Diem’s grandparents, Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford), who are well-meaning but full of righteous wrath about the woman who was responsible for their son’s death. And then there’s Ledger (Tyriq Withers). He’s the swarthy and strapping former NFL player — he had to retire after he blew out his shoulder — who was Scotty’s lifelong best friend. He now lives across the street from Scotty’s parents and has been a surrogate daddy for Diem. He also owns the bar, called The Bookstore, that used to be the actual bookstore where Kenna and Scotty hung out. She drops by the place again, and the sparks fly.
Why didn’t Kenna and Ledger ever meet before? Because, as the film keeps reminding us, he “was never around.” (I guess he was doing his NFL thing.) At first, when he discovers who she is, he’s in a rage too; but that melts away in about three minutes. The two become a secret couple, and in a funny way this movie about the transcendence of the maternal bond turns on Ledger’s evolving emotions — his realization that Kenna is a good woman, and that blaming her for Scotty’s death was shortsighted and too vengeful. Withers makes Ledger, in his omnipresent orange Ford pickup truck, a soulfully hunky gentle giant.
Kenna keeps notebooks in which she continues to write letters to Scotty, and when she finally reads the letter describing what happened the night of the accident, she’s exonerated in our minds — though we also think: Why didn’t she just say this in court? (More murky legal-system ethics.) The languid quality of “Reminders of Him” arises from the fact that we always know just where the story is headed: to a confrontation between Kenna and Diem’s grandparents. Yet the director, Vanessa Caswill, stages it all with a tenderly forlorn Middle American plausibility. There are no disruptive twists, à la “It Ends with Us.” Zoe Kosivic, who plays 5-year-old Diem, is a deft actor; she shows us how smart kids can be without coming off as only-in-the-movies “precocious.” And when Kenna finally gets to be in the girl’s presence, the scene is moving in an unforced way. It’s corn, but as “Reminders of Him” demonstrates, corn doesn’t have to be fake.
