It worked well for me.
Perhaps you need to be a certain age, or lost someone terribly special, to understand how finding someone new, who makes you feel alive again, how important that is to hang onto at any cost.
Bringing back a part of your life you thought you'd lost forever doesn't happen to many people, the lesser still as you get older and the world of the young and thoughtless throws you on the scrapheap.
I felt the film investigated the theme well, and keeps the viewer on tenterhooks throughout the impending "revelation" regarding Tom. In Nikki's mind a point was reached where the inevitable just didn't have to happen if she was careful enough, and after that point we as viewers just don't know where we are being taken next.
Remember how Nikki finally met Tom, and while trying to seem non-crazy and be polite, painted herself into a corner with not disclosing the "big secret"; the immediate question that would have leapt to Tom's mind would be "is this for real ?" Nikki tried but failed a number of times before she reached the aforementioned point, the further she fell into her construct the harder it was to get out, with greater and greater chance of loss at stake.
The end of the Mexico weekend made perfect sense to me; I think anyone with decency and honour would follow a similar path, although it also crossed my mind to "take a risk" and see how it went - as it was it was bittersweet enough for Tom, but how much more so for the viewer if he had simply kept the photo knowledge to himself.
The premise of 'what if" lingers throughout the entire film, and it also serves as a modern day study of what a fractured and grieving mind can make someone do when confronted with a second chance in life.
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robbystoner
10 years ago
Your post has a lot of feel and emotion behind it so I am responding on behalf of that. We might be a close age so perhaps that's why I relate.
"Bringing back a part of your life you thought you'd lost forever doesn't happen to many people, the lesser still as you get older and the world of the young and thoughtless throws you on the scrapheap. "
You are being unreasonably hard on yourself and unreasonably unfair to the younger generations. No one is throwing anyone into any scrap heap or thoughtless and young people have empathy and a social concience that is stronger than anything that was instilled in the past. THey have a great future ahead of them and I look forward to how they are going to solve some of the problems that have plagued society over the past 50 or 60 years. Inequality and consumerism and proverty. Just because they don't find us physically attractive has no bearing on anything (did you really find the aging 60 year old next door who was constantly staring and lusting after you physically attractive when you were in your early 20s or did you find them kind of creepy? Well, time has places you in that role now.)
You do not lose any part of your life. Life goes on for you until you are dead. You reminisce and yearn for when you were younger and you wonder what would happen if you only knew back them what you know now -- but there are two types of aging people in the world.. the ones that keep looking back and the ones that look at the present. The ones that say if I knew it back then I would have done it differently and the ones that say, if I knew it back then, odds are I would have made the exact same choices because thats the person I am and have always been.
My best wishes to you.
The film was very enjoyable with excellent acting and a great refreshing relief from the weak plots and unnatural over acting that one sees in a lot of modern hollywood popular films.
"Oh, Mama, can this really be the end, to be stuck inside of mobile
with the memphis blues again"
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lamont-hard
8 years ago
He looked like him on the outside but his odor, thought process, sexuality, memory, and a lot more were different. It would have caught up to her at some point. I did not believe she loved him at all. He was the closest she could get to what she needed. The ending to me said they both got something back. He helped her move on and before the reveal he thought she gave him love.
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