How to Film Love

There are stories that just grab you. Stories that just hold you and keep you no matter what you’re thinking or feeling. I’m not the sort of person who can experience stories in their entirety very easily. ADD runs in my family, and I often have trouble watching a film or reading a book, both things I love to do, without playing on my phone or sewing or doing something with my hands. I’m not good at staying engaged. Especially during movies, I don’t often find films where I’m not checking how much I have left in the middle of it, even during first time viewing at the cinema.

But there’s one film, no matter how many times I see it, I can’t possibly take my eyes off of. It’s one of those movies I know I love but forget about for a while, rediscover when they put it back on Netflix and fall in love all over again. And it’s one of the only films where I have never once checked my watch. That film is Josh Boone’s Stuck in Love, an independent romance drama from 2013.

Following the relationships of three couples—Greg Kinnear’s Bill as half of a divorced couple waiting desperately for his ex-wife, Jennifer Conolly’s Erica, to come back, Lily Collins’s cynical Sam and her sweet classmate, Logan Lerman’s Lou, and Nat Wolff’s hopeless romantic Rusty and the angel in the classroom, Kate, with a troubled past and a drug problem—the film examines romance in a way that idealises nothing. Characters are hurt, they make the wrong choices and don’t get each other back with grand romantic gestures. They’re small, sweet little love stories that may not always work out for the best but are important in the moments we experience them.

The film doesn’t have the most excellent reviews: 58 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 49 percent on Metacritic, and sure, there are places where it gets a bit sappy and moments that aren’t particularly realistic. But it’s a story that sits with you. It shows different types of relationships in a wholly sympathetic and accepting way, and for a girl who notoriously hates romance, this is a film that makes me cry every single time.

It isn’t a film that just showcases romantic drama either, but familial relationships and the relationships between people and their passions. The film features a family of novelists and writers and is the film that made me fall in love with writing again after years of bad learning experiences convinced me writing was not a feasible part of my future. Expressing one’s feelings in writing isn’t really a theme of the film, but the idea runs through every character’s journal entry, every story or book published, and every depiction of characters writing on screen. Books and writing are an outlet for the characters just as they’re an outlet for me, and I don’t have to relate to any one individual character to relate to the emotions, the ways they feel, and how they can express them. The (mostly) great performances, too, help to elevate the emotion, and it allows for the emotions, and occasionally sappy dialogue, to actually reach viewers to whom writing is also a passion.

It takes a lot to get me to love, or especially to write about, a romance film. And sure, I first saw this film, shortly after it was released, purely because it was a movie about writers. But it reached me in so many more ways than that. It was the first time—apart from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which doesn’t count because it’s based off of my favourite book—that I saw my fears about love and about life and relationships portrayed in a way that didn’t make me look like the bad guy. For every character, it’s okay to cry, and it’s the film that introduced the concept of giving someone your favourite…something, whether it’s book or film or music, being seen as a window to your soul. It makes me remember. It makes me hope that one day I won’t have to be afraid of potential relationships, that I don’t have to worry about ruining my life because every moment, every relationship, is important for one reason or another.

It’s a movie you have to sit with. It’s not one I can turn off and go back to my life. In fact, I’m writing this, still in the dark, on the laptop I finished the movie on ten minutes ago, because I needed to get my thoughts about it on paper. I needed to write what I am feeling right now. It’s something that’s very in line with the expression of emotion in the film and I think Josh Boone would be proud. If you like quiet, slightly sappy love stories, this is one I highly recommend. It’s not going to be the best movie you’ve ever seen, but it’ll make you think. And that’s, I think, the best thing a film can do.