Let me sum up what I learned from this movie: If you're an aging, philandering jerk, you can restore your relationship with the daughter you abandoned by seducing a terminally-ill girl half your age, cheating on her, then grieving over her unavoidable death. If that sounds like "real life" to you, you're gonna LOVE this movie.
Ryder plays an early-20-something girl who falls for a 48-year-old restaurant owner. The lead characters "fall in love," but their relationship is strictly 2-dimensional. We're never given any clue about what is actually attracting these two people to each other. Her terminal illness is also totally unbelievable; Ryder's character has quite normal capabilities for the most part, until she suddenly gasps or unexpectedly falls over unconscious at crucial moments. The plot is totally disjointed, with very little understandable cause and effect established between various actions and reactions.
Gere is a decent actor, at least when he plays his usual stock character (the rich, self-centered playboy). He has some stupid lines to deliver, but he manages to be the only believable thing in the movie. But that only allowed me to hate his character with a passion. He's not just a womanizer, he's a big enough jerk to --now, try to get all this-- have quickie sex with an old girlfriend at his best friend's house, during a children's Halloween party, which he is attending with his current, dying girlfriend, whom he says he loves more deeply than anyone else he has ever known. After lying about the tryst, Gere finally tells Ryder that he HAD to have sex with another woman because he was "scared." Oh please! The screenwriter must be equally a jerk, because he obviously thinks we will actually LIKE this creep. After that kind of behavior, not only do I fail to like him, I can't care at all what happens to him.
Of course, Ryder's poor little sick girl quickly melts and forgives him, and believes him when he whispers to her he loves her. Frankly, at that point in the film I was thinking, "She deserves whatever she gets. Neither one of these people have a clue what love is." For some reason, by the end of the film, Ryder's sickness and death makes things okay between the restaurateur and his estranged daughter. Why? How? Who knows! Who CARES; I was just grateful the film was over!
Ryder plays an early-20-something girl who falls for a 48-year-old restaurant owner. The lead characters "fall in love," but their relationship is strictly 2-dimensional. We're never given any clue about what is actually attracting these two people to each other. Her terminal illness is also totally unbelievable; Ryder's character has quite normal capabilities for the most part, until she suddenly gasps or unexpectedly falls over unconscious at crucial moments. The plot is totally disjointed, with very little understandable cause and effect established between various actions and reactions.
Gere is a decent actor, at least when he plays his usual stock character (the rich, self-centered playboy). He has some stupid lines to deliver, but he manages to be the only believable thing in the movie. But that only allowed me to hate his character with a passion. He's not just a womanizer, he's a big enough jerk to --now, try to get all this-- have quickie sex with an old girlfriend at his best friend's house, during a children's Halloween party, which he is attending with his current, dying girlfriend, whom he says he loves more deeply than anyone else he has ever known. After lying about the tryst, Gere finally tells Ryder that he HAD to have sex with another woman because he was "scared." Oh please! The screenwriter must be equally a jerk, because he obviously thinks we will actually LIKE this creep. After that kind of behavior, not only do I fail to like him, I can't care at all what happens to him.
Of course, Ryder's poor little sick girl quickly melts and forgives him, and believes him when he whispers to her he loves her. Frankly, at that point in the film I was thinking, "She deserves whatever she gets. Neither one of these people have a clue what love is." For some reason, by the end of the film, Ryder's sickness and death makes things okay between the restaurateur and his estranged daughter. Why? How? Who knows! Who CARES; I was just grateful the film was over!