Delayed Reaction: Love Story

The Pitch: I want to make everyone cry. Everyone!!!

A rich Harvard boy and a "poor" Radcliffe girl fall in love. Then she dies.

I saw Love Story for exactly one reason: It was a massive hit. For some context, adjusted for inflation, it was bigger than Spider-Man and Independence Day, and only slightly below The Dark Knight and The Avengers. It made a lot of money. Like a lot of movies though that made an insane amount of money, the reviews are pretty mixed, even in hindsight, when people tend to show undeserved reverence.

This plays like the proto-RomCom without the 'Com'. There's a nice meet-cute. We see all the stages of the relationship. They fight. They make up. They have "hard times". They have easy times. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. I'm still trying to figure out if the opening scene is a strength or a burden. I could see most movies saving the gut-punch of Ali MacGraw dying for the end. Letting that be known early does put a cloud over the whole film. Without it, the movie is pretty slight. Manufactured drama, in fact. I had trouble buying into Ryan O'Neal's feud with his father and the degree to which he was disowned. I also had trouble seeing Ali MacGraw as a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. She's fairly comfortably attending Radcliffe, after all.

Still, McGraw and O'Neal are charming together. Except for one of the dumbest taglines ever ("Love means never having to say you're sorry"), I like their back and fourth. I had trouble breaking myself from thinking of Zack Morris every time she called O'Neal "preppy" though. I liked the score a lot at first, but they really overused it.

As with most mega hits, I understand about 2/3s of the money it made. The last third is just "right place, right time". It certainly makes more sense than My Big Fat Greek Wedding: still the most unlikely hit I've been alive for. Ultimately, I had too much trouble connecting to this, despite the parts that do work, which dulled my feelings on the big tear-jerker moments. It hit a point where I realized the movie was sad for the sake of being sad. There wasn't really a lesson or a theme to it.

Also, I got really mad that the doctor told O'Neal about McGraw's condition before he told her. That's not a common thing, right? At least, not anymore, right?

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend