No cure for love

Marley (Kate Hudson) is a true bundle of energy and a career woman who likes to take what she wants. She lives her life to the fullest, spending time with her friends and enjoying sex with attractive men without committing to a steady relationship. On top of that, she is extremely successful at her job. Just when Marley is feeling like life couldn't be more beautiful, she learns that she has cancer and the prospects for a cure are relatively slim. As Marley tries to cope with the new life situation, a relationship develops between her and her attending physician, the shy Dr. Goldstein (Gael García Bernal), who shows her how important love is to a fulfilling life. But it may be too late for that now.

No cure for love tries to approach what is in itself a very heavy subject with a certain lightheartedness. For instance, God appears to Marley in the form of Whoopi Goldberg, who has some pretty amusing conversations with the sick woman, and Lucy Punch (Bad Teacher) also provides some pretty good laughs as Marley's best friend Sarah. The whole thing is spiced up with a dash of romance and family drama before the sappiness takes over at the end. In itself, it's very refreshing that taboo subjects like dying and cancer aren't handled with kid gloves here, and the viewer isn't presented with two hours of constant suffering. That's what real life is for, after all.

However, the film just doesn't really want to work. Part of the reason for this is that Kate Hudson has become really tiresome in the role of the party girl. Granted, she plays this character convincingly time and time again. But her actual talent, which she was allowed to show off from time to time at the beginning of her career, is once again buried under a routinely delivered performance here. Worse, in the film's dramatic moments, Hudson lacks any convincing power, and the dark circles under her eyes given to her by the makeup artist can do little to help.

Her co-stars are a little more convincing. Gael García Bernal is tremendously likable in the role of the somewhat overly concerned doctor and Kathy Bates, Lucy Punch or Rosemarie DeWitt also deliver more than solid performances. But a rather weak script and half-baked direction keep getting in the way of their efforts. It's a shame that director Nicole Kassell, who directed a great drama with The Woodsman, doesn't have the courage to take her inherently beautiful and moving story a little off the beaten path. Both Marley's transformation, her relationship with Dr. Goldstein, or her conflicts with her father, are all filled with common clichés. The opportunity to really move the viewer was simply given away here, in the hope of appealing to a wider audience with a mainstream production. Whether this will succeed, however, may rightly be doubted.

No cure for love has some nice moments and the film is based on a good story. But what could have been a refreshingly light-footed drama with a lot of heart, is in the end unfortunately only half-baked kitsch, in which even a genre fan like the writer of these lines has only little joy. Therefore: unfortunately only very conditionally worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp