Sweet November: My Lady-Bits Will Heal You
The WORST Manic Pixie Dream Girl
I will not lie to you: My reasons for renting Sweet November in 2003 were not virtuous. I had a massive crush on Jason Isaacs (of The Patriot fame and later, Harry Potter’s Lucius Malfoy) as well as Michael Rosenbaum, who starred in the WB’s Smallville as Lex Luthor.
I scoured IMDB to find EVERYTHING Rosenbaum was in so I could watch it. Imagine my delight to see he’d starred alongside Isaacs. In a romance!
I couldn’t get to Blockbuster fast enough!
It uh… didn’t turn out how I’d hoped.
However…
That’s not why this movie deserves the first-place trophy in the sad halls of awful Thanksgiving-themed movies.
Even for seasoned consumers of Lifetime and Hallmark movies, there occasionally emerges a film so offensively sweet, so cloyingly sentimental, and so oblivious to real human behavior that it threatens its viewers with a coronary.
Sweet November is about Nelson, played by Keanu Reeves, a mean-spirited workaholic who gets himself fired in a way that beggars belief. In a weird, not at all cute meet-cute, he meets Sarah, a flighty, whimsical woman who persuades him to spend a month with her.
He agrees, but is later shocked to find out she has been doing this every month. Her gay best friend (the criminally under-utilized Jason Isaacs) calls Nelson “November.” The last guy was “October” and the one before that… you get the picture.
That’s what Sarah does. She helps people. Men, specifically. Through the power of her whimsy (and sexual prowess), she takes emotionally-stunted men (some of whom including Nelson are addicts) and she fixes them.
In a month.
Like all manic pixie dream girls, she is able to use her feminine wiles to ooze into Nelson’s cracks and form him into a new, better person.
More than her whimsy, her adorkable feminine shenanigans, her patient and sensual schooling of Nelson shows him all he’s been missing in his work-focused life.
Honestly, I could have forgiven the movie (and its writers) if it had continued on this path. Boy meets girl, girl improves boy, boy marries girl. Okay, I’ll take it. I could have even forgiven the complete lack of chemistry between Charlize and Keanu.
(Real question, has Keanu ever been a good romantic lead? Nothing comes to mind)
Instead (23-year-old spoiler warning), it turns out that Sarah has non-Hodgkins lymphoma. So even when Nelson falls in love with her, she tells him to leave. “November is over.”
She cruelly rebuffs him and sends him packing. Even when he chases her down and insists he’s not afraid of her illness, that he won’t run away from her impending death, she won’t have it, even though she returns his affections.
“I want you to always remember me this way.”
So to recap, dying girl (who knows she’s dying) barters, begs, and manipulates a series of men into falling in love with her, making several of them propose marriage to her (Nelson is the only one she wanted to say yes to, she confesses). All while knowing she will not be around for long.
It struck a particularly nasty cord with me and I admit I projected my own fears of being abandoned by a future partner onto the (male) script writer.
Was this wish fulfillment for him? Did he wish that women would just go away and leave the men who love them when they fall ill? You know, to spare men the bother of caring for the sick and no-longer attractive woman?
Or did he think this is what women are? So horrifically vain they would send away a man who loves them to ensure his last memory of her would be one of beauty?
It’s gross either way.
Roger Ebert said it best: “Sweet November” passes off pathological behavior as romantic bliss. It’s about two sick and twisted people playing mind games and calling it love.
If only I’d read that review before I scurried off to Blockbuster.
Damn you, Rosenbaum, and your blue-eyed smolder…
In the end, "Sweet November" is less a movie and more a cautionary tale about the perils of romanticizing dysfunction. If you're looking for a film to watch with your significant other to celebrate your love, go with The Wedding Singer.
It’s the best and I will not be dissuaded from that opinion.
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Hey Rosenbaum is a WKU alumni (like me) so you have good tastes in men at least. 😉