One sermon about forgiveness from the pastor, and instant turnaround ensues. Marinated in country-music mythology, Forever My Girl extracts every last ounce of juice from the potent fantasy binary of small town integrity versus big city sin, before marrying the two with minimal fuss and bother that must have looked plausible on paper. The problem is not the well-worn plot or familiar characters, but the fact that Wolf adds no depth or complication to either that would make the film her own. The movie flows along atmospherically with a country soundtrack corralling our emotions. Writer-director Bethany Ashton Wolf has a deft way with actors, and Peter Cambor is especially good as Liam's long-suffering but humane manager. Everyone, that is, except for a feisty young girl named Billy (Abby Ryder Fortson), who is lumbered with dialogue better suited to a cocky teenager, and who is destined to bestow much-needed character-firming on the prodigal from out of town. Liam may have been golden among the fleshpots of New Orleans, but when he first blows into town, everyone wants to slug him or ignore him. There he lands in deep doo-doo with a singularly unreceptive Josie, to say nothing of his entire hometown populace and his father, who happens to be the local pastor. He writes and performs songs with blaring themes like "I'd Give it All Up for You." Concertgoers, average age thirteen, are ecstatic, but Liam sits around pining over a message on an ancient cell phone until a convenient tragedy propels him homeward. Eager to hit the big time, a panicked Liam takes off for New Orleans, though why he can't take Josie with him is a mystery that will languish unexplained until shortly before the close.Įight years pass, and we find Liam, a deeply unhappy country music god in all the usual ways - drugs, booze, groupies. He and his music are nicely played by Alex Roe, who is British but not so's you'd notice. The woe comes on fast when a dewy young bride named Josie (Jessica Rothe) gets jilted at the altar by her high-school sweetheart, Liam, a pretty, green-eyed fellow with a lot of fetching chin stubble. The phone apparently does play a notable role in the original book, but in the movie, it was turned into a far more central narrative motif and a driving plot device to help move things forward.Country, Wronged: Music star Liam Page (Alex Roe) returns to his hometown, and his ex Josie (Jessica Rothe), whom he left to pursue his career.īased on a YA novel by Heidi McLaughlin, the endearingly old-fangled Forever My Girl is basically a stretched-out country music song with eye-catching Southern visuals and a familiar loop of lovelorn sorrow topped with uplift you can see coming from scene one. Elsewhere in CinemaBlend's discussion about the process of adapting Forever My Girl, Alex Roe and Jessica Rothe also noted that the presence of Liam's beat-up flip phone (which contains an old message from Josie) was given increased focus. The decision to make Billy a daughter instead of a son was not the only change that Bethany Ashton Wolf made to the source material in the transition from page to screen. Though a substantial change such as this could've been met with derision by fans, the "charming" performance delivered by Ant-Man's Abby Ryder Fortson seems to have generally won over viewers with a preexisting knowledge and appreciation of the book. However, this is one of those situations in which an actor can step into an existing character and allow it to take on new life. So it seems that, in Heidi McLaughlin's original Forever My Girl novel, Billy is actually Liam and Josie's son and not their daughter. Originally, it's a son, but luckily, she's such an amazing young actress and she's so charming and so cool to watch that I think fans of the book kind of appreciate that she's the daughter. Obviously with Abby Fortson, who plays Billy.
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