At this point, James Garner pipes up to say, “If summer romances have one thing in common, it’s that they’re shooting stars!” Let me stop you there. Because they have at least two things in common right up front, which are 1) they’re romances…2) that happen in the summer. Who are you, Forrest Gump’s mom?
Meanwhile, in World War II, Kevin Connolly dies. Like, four seconds after he gets there. It is not a good part of the movie, as parts of movies go.
McAdams goes to work at a hospital for wounded soldiers. “To her,” Garner intones, “the broken men with shattered bodies who filled the ward were all [Goz], or someone who fought beside him in the jungle or the frozen snow-swept road.” YOU GUYS. FOR FUCK’S SAKE. SHE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HE’S IN THE ARMY. SHE HASN’T GOTTEN ANY OF HIS 365 BORING LETTERS, REMEMBER? THIS NOT-GETTING-THE-LETTERS MIX-’EM-UP IS, LIKE, THE DETAIL THAT YOUR WHOLE MOVIE HINGES ON.
One of her patients, James Marsden, starts hitting on her at work even though he’s heavily medicated, they’ve never had a real conversation, and she’s just trying to do her fucking job without some dude in a full-body cast constantly pointing at his papier-mâché boner. After he recovers, he tracks her down at her school and is like, “Look! I got my cast off! [WINK] Let’s date!” And so they do. And then he proposes. So she says yes. Because why not.
Yo, does this really have to be McAdams’s life? Just endlessly stalked and followed and watched and obsessed over by every man she ever meets? And then she has to say, “Thank you,” and call it “love”?
This sucks!
Gosling comes home from the war and—being the king of healthy impulses—decides to buy that pile of rotten boards where he almost put it in McAdams all those years earlier and fix it up. PRETTY sure that guy’s a teardown, but okay, buddy.
Goz spends all of his time obsessively working on the house. One time he sees McAdams out of the bus window and chases her down the street, only to discover her making out with Marsden in a cafe. So instead of talking to her or being normal, he just breathes heavily behind a bush and then goes home and has cry-sex with a war widow whom he’s TOO BROKEN TO LOVE. (Note to my partner: if I ever get dementia, and you show up to read to me from your diary every fucking day, feel free to leave out the part where you bang the war widow.)
One day, McAdams is trying on literally the world’s ugliest harlequin jester vampire wedding sack when she spots a photo of Gosling and his stupid house in the newspaper.
She rushes into Marsden’s office and is like, “Listen. Bro. I have to go on a trip that definitely has 100 percent absolutely zero to do with Ryan Gosling’s magnificent penis. Also, I never paint anymore, which apparently is a beloved hobby of mine that has barely been mentioned once in this entire film but is now a major emotional sticking point. The fact that I’ve quit painting is somehow your Ryan Gosling’s penis. I MEAN FAULT.”
She goes to Ryan Gosling’s house and immediately drives her car through his fence like a classic woman.
Then we have to spend twenty minutes watching footage from James Garner’s actual doctor’s appointment. The doctor asks James Garner why he spends so much time reading out loud to Gena Rowlands. “Science only takes you so far,” Garner says. “And then comes God.” I wonder if there are audience members, at this point in the movie, who are still wondering how the Garner/Rowlands story line relates to the Gosling/McAdams story line. If so, I think those people should have to go live on an island and weave their own shoes. Like, I find it hard to believe that Gena Rowlands the character didn’t see where this was going by minute three.
Gosling and McAdams have dinner and then he asks her to come back in the morning. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”
IT’S MY PENIS. It’s always been my penis.
Meanwhile, James Garner’s kids show up at the old folks’ home and are like, “Daaaaaad, stop reading your notebook to this old lady over and over. She doesn’t even like you.” But Garner refuses: “That’s my sweetheart in there. This is my home now. Your mother is my home.” I live in your mom. I’ll never forget the first time I “lived” in your mom. Here’s a fucking four-hour movie about it.
In the morning, Marsden calls McAdams’s hotel room and she’s like, OH GAH GOO GOO GAR GAR NO NOTHING’S WRONG I’M NOT BEING WEIRD YOU’RE THE ONE BEING WEIRD, and then goes back to Gosling’s house for her “surprise.” He rows her out into this goose-infested swamp (the part this movie leaves out is that geese are rank, shit-covered, hissing demons, but I guess it’s okay because they are his kin), even though he knows it’s about to start pouring down rain and says so before they get in the boat.
When it starts raining, both of them are like, “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
OH MY GOD, THE RAIN TOLD THE FUNNIEST JOKE.
And then she’s like, why didn’t you write me, and he’s like, I wrote you 365 letters, and she’s like, oh okay I forgive you, and they lick each other’s faces, and geese are watching, which is weird because one of those is his mom, and then it’s time for penis-in-vagina (for best results, as you watch the sex scene, remember that James Garner is describing it all to an old lady with dementia). In the morning, McAdams wakes up to a special gift from Gosling. He got her some painting stuff!!! Because he’s not like James Marsden, who made PAINTING ILLEGAL.
Mom shows up and warns them that Marsden is coming, and then drives McAdams over to the quarry and is like, “See that dirty laborer? I used to love him, but I abandoned him because I’m a classist shithead who loved shutters. JUST LIKE YOU. So now I just come here sometimes and stare at him and masturbate in my car. Just kidding, I am repressed.” Then she finally hands over all the letters she intercepted from Gosling, and literally says—as far as I can discern—“I’ve been keeping these inside my ball bag for seven years.”
I’ve been keeping these inside my ball bag for seven years. I’VE BEEN KEEPING THESE INSIDE MY BALL BAG FOR SEVEN YEARS.
I was confused at first, but later I googled it and found out that “ball bag” was 1940s Southern slang for nutsack.
Then Gosling and McAdams get in one last fight because this movie needed to be longer, and he tells her that she’s “a pain in the ass 99 percent of the time.” That means that he loves her approximately three and a half days per year. The rest of the time she makes him feel like a spear or dagger is literally stabbing him in his asshole.
So McAdams is like, “I have to go.” (Whispering: “Number two.”)
Feeling conflicted, she goes to hang out with Marsden, hoping that it’ll help her make up her mind. Marsden tells her, “In spite of everything, I love you,” which is almost as hot a pickup line as “You are a pain in the ass 99 percent of the time.” HOW WILL SHE CHOOSE BETWEEN THESE CASANOVAS? WAS THIS DIALOGUE WRITTEN BY MYSTERY?
Uuuuuuuugh, anyway, she chooses Gosling, OF COURSE, and then they animorph into James Garner and Gena Rowlands, and then James Garner’s magic notebook cures Gena Rowlands’s dementia for five minutes—you know, like medical science—but every time the skeptical doctor comes in, she goes back to being senile again because she’s the Michigan J. Frog of dementia, and then we find out that the title of the notebook is The Story of Our Lives (HEY, WHY NOT JUST CALL IT BOOK), and it turns out the notebook was Tom Riddle’s diary all along, and then Gena Rowlands is like, “Do you think we could just die together real quick?” and he’s like, “Yeah, prolly,” so then they do. Cause of death: felt like it. Cause of death: hospital food, amirite? Cause of death: basilisk.