The Painful Eagerness of Unfed Hope
LOVE OF MY LIFE – a film by Joan Carr-Wiggin – (limited spoilers)
Grace (Anna Chancellor) has a brain tumor and has been told she might die during the operation to remove it — an operation scheduled for four days hence. She makes the mistake of telling her husband Tom (James Fleet) about it, setting in motion a series of events that will drastically alter the lives of everyone around her, and prevent her from finishing George Eliot’s Middlemarch before entering hospital. (This post’s title is a quote from that book.) Grace asks Tom not to tell anyone else about her condition but before she can stop him, he phones their daughter Kaitlyn (Hannah Emily Anderson) and that opens the floodgates.
Soon Kaitlyn, and Grace’s other daughter Zoe (Katie Boland), show up at the house along with Zoe’s dad Richard (John Hannah). (Tom is Kaitlyn’s father.) Richard is a novelist and professional mansplainer who, upon learning of Grace’s condition, decides that she is the “love of his life” and he has to win her back, despite the fact that she left him after he had an affair. His current wife Tamara (Hermione Norris) finds out his intentions, catches a plane from England, and becomes Grace’s fourth unwanted houseguest.
Because she doesn’t want Grace to die thinking her daughter is a loser, Kaitlyn pretends that her current boyfriend is the love of her life, and persuades Zoe to do the same. Kaitlyn’s boyfriend Will (Scott Cavalheiro) turns out to be married, and his wife Darla (Merran Carr-Wiggin) turns up at the restaurant where he is meeting Grace and Kaitlyn, foiling Kaitlyn’s efforts at deception. It was for naught in any event, because Grace reveals that she’d hoped her daughter was a lesbian.
Grace would have been quite happy to spend what might be her last few days alone with Middlemarch, which is an interesting book for her her to choose, since her situation seems to closely parallel that of the book’s main character, Dorothea Brooke.
Her home-away-from-home is the nearby all-night coffee shop, a place where she can selectively entertain the people she really wants to see. When she needs to talk to her boss Ben (Greg Wise) on her home turf, she invites him to the coffee shop. When she finally decides to have sex with her ex before the operation, it happens in the middle of the night at the coffee shop after the fellow running the otherwise empty establishment is bribed to leave and lock up for an hour.
There is a lovely scene about an hour into the movie where Grace gives advice to her two daughters, and at the same time discovers that architecture is the true love of her life. She has been a mediocre architect because she has lacked the self-confidence to take chances and truly express herself in her designs. (It is this same attitude that caused her to marry Tom.) She throws caution to the winds and create a home design that is distinctively her own. Ben, who might be in love with Grace, is amazed.
BEN: “It’s beautiful. I didn’t know you could do that.”
GRACE: “Neither did I, and I’ve got so many ideas, for a library with a three-storey atrium, and a community center with an indoor garden. I just–“
BEN: “Better late than never.”
GRACE: “Do you think? Or is it better to die thinking you did the best you could? I don’t really know.”
Grace survives, and builds that house she designed under threat of death, but relationship-wise the film’s ending is vague. It would be pleasing to believe that Grace buys that house; lives there hermit-like except for occasional visits to the coffee shop; and continues designing extraordinary and inventive structures for the rest of her days.
It seems almost certain that Tamara will divorce Richard and marry Tom, confusing Kaitlyn and making Zoe very happy, and that Tom and Tamara will move to England, never to be heard from again. Kaitlyn, who takes after her father, will take a job at the coffee shop so she occasionally gets to see her mother. Capitalizing on her father’s name, Zoe will write a best-selling novel that is a thinly-disguised account of the events leading up to the what happens in this film, then relocate to another city and live in a house designed by Grace.