Continuing this trend of Valentine's Day romance releases, I was very excited for this film since its first trailer late last year. Stella Meghie's The Photograph is a movie that I desperately wanted to enjoy, despite me basically knowing that it was going to be a typical romance feature. What I did not know, however, was how predictable and typical it was going to be. This film is one of the most poorly structured and dull romance films as of recent and one that I just could not get invested in. There was nothing entirely wrong with its story or how these characters came to fall in love with each other and I did really enjoy the multi-generational aspect of the story, but the individual romances themselves were not interesting enough to make me care. I could tell what Meghie was going for with her slow-burn direction and thankfully, the performances from the two leads practically carry this movie's tender energy, but the incredibly slow pacing and extended sequences of nothing happening made me lose my interest and wonder when, if ever, I would get out of the theater.
Michael (Lakeith Stanfield), a writer for an online publication and Mae (Issa Rae), a photographer, live in New York City and meet when Michael is hired to write an article about Mae's mother who had recently passed away. Spanning the course of multiple generations, Mae and Michael learn to love each other despite their career paths and work to form a relationship through their personal hardships. Meghie's script and direction show that, at the least, she knows how to write an emotional and coherent story and tell it through the camera. This film is a very typical addition to this genre that is set up very basic, yet still manages to hit all the right notes. None of these notes were anything extraordinary, but the story itself holds on and is able to work within Meghie's direction mildly well. This film does fantastic when it comes to hitting all of the tropes of a romance film, such as the two lead characters having liberal arts careers and, of course, them living in New York City. The music throughout this film also added a lot to the environment and was great to see it utilized in a modern romance tale such as this. While the characteristics of these almost stereotypes were glaring, a nice change of pace was seeing a story about two black characters develop a genuine love for each other without conflict regarding their skin color or race issues. Stanfield and Rae are great together and this representation, despite the film itself being a bit lacking, is always fantastic to see. Both of their performances were excellent and their chemistry together is very authentic. These two definitely carried the film and seeing Stanfield flex his range, especially in the past few years, is always a welcome development.
The only aspect of this entire film that really makes it stand out amongst the others would be the use of multi-generational storytelling and flashbacks. It was so interesting to see how the two different love stories went back and forth and how Michael and Mae were able to learn more about themselves as they experienced the love story of the couple from the 1980s. However, if it wasn't for that element of the writing, this film would be a whole lot worse. This entire story is incredibly dull and took a lot out of me in order to finish. There would be long periods of time that I truly felt nothing of importance was going to happen and these sequences seemed to last forever. The individual stories of these characters and how they became who they were are not built up nearly enough and so I never felt like the problems Michael and Mae had in the predictable end of the second act were ever warranted. I started to not care at all about these characters and whether or not they ended up together because of this unbelievably slow storytelling. Meghie's direction quickly becomes intensely slow and whether or not that was intentional does not quite matter when I became uninterested so quickly. If Meghie's goal was to go about this film in a very laid-back and sluggish manner than she definitely accomplished that goal but at such a pricey cost. While this hurts the film's overall entertainment factor, I did appreciate how the story is not overly saccharine. Romance films that utilize cheesy tropes and dialogue in order to get emotions out of their audience annoy the ever-loving shit out of me and this movie still dipped its toes in that but did so with just a tiny bit more poise than the rest.
Stella Meghie's The Photograph is one that I really thought could make up for the expected slew of bad, studio releases in the first few months of the year but I can see now why it hasn't been much talked about. Despite the fantastic performances from Rae and Stanfield and some excellent atmospheric building on Meghie's part, the story itself is what needs to be front and center. The script could have easily been condensed down into a much shorter film but her choice of dragging the audience along for this story for almost two hours was the worst possible mistake.
My Rating: ★★½
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