Jess (Drew Barrymore) is about to have her first baby after a long time trying to get pregnant, and the only one she wants in the theatre, aside from the midwife, is Milly (Toni Collette) her wildly gregarious PR executive pal.
The story is told in flashback as we learn more about the two girls who have been best friends since childhood, when Jess came from the USA to live in London. Their friendship is built on memories of student partying, like the night one of them punched a policeman, still the source of mirth - charming I’m sure. Jess, who has some kind of green conscience, works in community gardens. Her partner is - no kidding - named Iago (Paddy Considine). Milly’s man about the house is Kit (Dominic Cooper) and they have two kids, a boy and a girl.
Then Milly discovers that she has breast cancer. She tries to process the news, and finds it impossible to tell her husband and children. It's shaping up to be a strong film, before it begins to balloon awfully and to lose itself, pear-shaped, in very weak comedy indeed.
Jacqueline Bisset plays Milly's mother in a profoundly irritating role, like a cast-off from Absolutely Fabulous. Any more is to spoil, but then again to spoil what? Because Miss You Already, after early promise and some fine acting from both female leads, collapses in creaky, unimaginative dialogue and wooden double entendres which, when they aren’t corny, are crude and tactless. (15A Cert? Hmm.)
You keep hoping something will redeem its rapid decline. Surely it will get better, surely the actors who do their best with it, will help it plateau into something half-decent? But such is not to be the case.
In one of the most risible scenes, Milly, while in the throes of serious illness, impulsively hires a taxi to take her and Jess all the way from London to Yorkshire. There the pair indulge in some drunken carousing on the moors with the taxi-driver Ahmed also joining in the merry dance. It's also, as it happens, the perfect cover for Milly to meet up with a handsome, if rather dumb barman whom she met on a drunken skite in London. If it was a bloke in this instance, he would be called a bastard and cheat - but no such opprobrium for unfaithful wife Milly who is sick, you know. With a very poor screenplay by actress Morwenna Banks, Miss You Already is a cynical exercise in gushing, over-emotional melodrama and is certainly not worth seeing.
Paddy Kehoe
