IMDb Link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111693/
Meg Ryan and Andy Garcia star in this ponderous tale of heavy drinking and child slapping. The film opens with the couple pretending not to know each other in a bar and chatting each other up, to the annoyance of the other horny patrons and the viewer at home. After this bar room setting various other scenes follow, all of which contain a casually placed beer bottle or cocktail. Remember that, it may be important.
Things get worse rapidly as we see Meg swigging bottles of vodka hidden in the laundry and falling over a lot. Things hit rock bottom when she slaps her nagging daughter and crashes through the shower door while pished. Garcia who up to now was in blissful ignorance, sauntering about in his pilot’s uniform, immediately checks her into rehab. From here the blame game starts and the films unravels. Meg is a real pain and wimpy Andy just looks doleful. As the couple grow apart a youthful Phillip Seymour Hoffman shows up to drive a wedge between them and, as the marriage crumbles, all seems lost. But of course, it isn’t.
I started out enjoying this preachy tosh, with every sign of booze an amusing portent of doom. Once the family collapses and the rehab sequence starts things get an awful lot duller and less entertaining. Endless scenes of sobbing kids are inter cut with shouting matches, and frankly it was an effort to stay with it. At the end the moral seemed to be ‘Keep drinking or your family will fall apart’. That can’t be right surely?
At a hefty two hours ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ asks a lot of its audience and I for one would recommend a stiff drink or three to get you through it.
Best Bit : Meg’s shower stumble - don’t get up! - Oh wait do.
‘W’ Rating 13/23
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