Warning: Spoilers abound.
In the 1947 classic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” protagonist George Bailey, who is considering suicide, sees what would have happened to his wife Mary if he had never been born.
With George Bailey alive, Mary is a radiant, enthusiastic wife and mother. Without him, she is a downcast librarian, single and seemingly worn down by life.
The new movie “Me Before You” is essentially a story about a Mary without her George Bailey.
And, incredibly, the movies tries to spin its Mary’s life as better without her love.
But it doesn’t work.
“Me Before You” tells the story of 26-year-old Louisa Clark, a cheerful British girl who is employed as a caretaker for six months for a handsome young man, Will Traynor, who is a quadriplegic as a result of a tragic accident.
After she has been employed for a time, Louisa finds out Will is intending to end his life at the end of her six months. Devastated, Louisa—who has a perky, can-do attitude it’s a little surreal to see portrayed without cynicism in a movie released in 2016—becomes determined to show Will that life is worth living. She takes him to a horse race and a concert; she accompanies him to a wedding; she arranges a trip to a beautiful tropical island. And the two begin to fall in love.
Then Will tells Louisa he still intends to end his life.
Louisa bursts into tears—ugly, wrenching tears—and runs away from Will. Of course, this being a Hollywood film, she is eventually brought around. After a cursory debate—which features her mom saying assisted suicide is no better than murder, and her sister and dad taking the perspective that she should support Will, even in this—Louisa rushes to Switzerland, where Will is ending his life.
In a setting that looks like HGTV’s ideal version of heaven (everything white, with just enough rustic and French country touches to make it nonbland), Louisa joins Will’s parents in saying goodbye to him. The movie ends with her in Paris, reading a letter he wrote to her, encouraging her to pursue her own dreams and “live boldly.”
But Will—and “Me Before You—has a narrow perspective of what it means to live boldly. Sure, as a quadriplegic, Will could no longer perform the athletic feats he used to do, and he was dependent on other people for getting dressed and fed, and a multitude of other tasks.
He taught her how to live. She taught him how to love. #MeBeforeYou
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Yet, as “Me Before You” shows, Will had other, different deficits and limitations before his accident.
In one monologue, Louisa, who comes from a family that struggles to stay afloat, rips apart the way of life of the rich (a lifestyle that Will was set to embark on). She says she’d never want to be a woman whose husband went on to sleep with the secretary, and then goes on to try to cope with the pain of a loveless marriage by embracing pilates and horse riding. Later on, Will admits he probably wouldn’t ever have noticed the lower-class Louisa if not for the accident.
There is also the telling difference between Will and Louisa’s boyfriend, Patrick, a fitness fanatic who is literally running in half his scenes, and has all the physical abilities Will so wishes he had again. Yet Patrick has clear deficits of the spirit: He struggles to be unselfish or caring toward Louisa, always focused on his own life, most clearly so when he gives her for her birthday a necklace with a pendant featuring his name.
In contrast, Will, who has clearly been listening to Louisa, gives her a gift that makes her jump up and squeal: a pair of striped tights, just like the ones she had as a child and has longed to wear again ever since she outgrew them.
It’s time to experience #MeBeforeYou. #LiveBoldly and get your tickets now!
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The scene Louisa opens the striped tights from Will.
But in the limited, shallow perspective of “Me Before You,” only one of these men is “disabled.”
When he tells Louisa he is still ending his life, Will makes the case that he cannot live the way he is living as a quadriplegic, that he can’t bear to go on with his limited abilities.
This is one of the movie’s most insane plot holes: At no point is there ever any mention of Will’s psychological state, of whether he possibly is suffering from clinical depression. We learn all about Will’s physical limitations, but there’s zero mention of possible mental woes or treatment of them, of whether taking antidepressants and perhaps seeking spiritual peace as well could possibly help Will realize that while his life may not be the one he expected, it’s worth living.
Unfortunately, when it comes to those seeking assisted suicide, it’s not just Hollywood that turns a blind eye to the possibility of depression, as a 2015 report from my colleague Ryan T. Anderson showed:
Only five of the 178 Oregon patients who died under the Oregon assisted suicide laws in 2013 and 2014 were referred for any psychiatric or psychological evaluation. Remarkably, patients were referred for psychiatric evaluation in less than 5.5 percent of the 859 cases of assisted suicide reported in Oregon since its law went into effect in 1997.
This is a tragedy of its own.
“No one’s suicide should be treated as noble and inspirational,” John Kelly, a member of the disability rights group Not Dead Yet and someone who has the same condition as Will, said in a statement. “We reject this discrimination. Our suicides should be viewed as tragedies like anyone else’s.”
Exactly.
The ending of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” (Photo: World History Archive/Newscom)
Once Hollywood understood that, making movies that affirmed life’s beauty, even when it’s tough, even when things are dark. “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” says the angel to George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
“Me Before You” wants the audience to believe that personal choice comes first, even if it means leaving that “awful hole” in loved ones’ lives.
But contrast the ending of “It’s a Wonderful Life”—an exuberant George Bailey kissing his kids and wife—with the ending of “Me Before You”—Louisa sitting by herself, completely alone, in Paris—and there’s no comparison about which ending is happier. The tagline for “Me Before You” is: “Live Boldly. Live Well. Just Live.”
If only the movie had just heeded its own motto.
