Directed by Washington, this story based on a reporter’s memoir about her soldier husband and their son fails to find a compelling focus
Director Denzel
Washington and his stars do their best with this bland, shallow and awkwardly structured film. It’s a romantic drama based on the bestselling 2008 memoir from publisher and former
New York Times reporter Dana Canedy, about the journal that her soldier husband Charles Monroe King wrote for their infant son Jordan just before King’s death in
Iraq – telling Jordan how to respect
Women, himself and his country.
Chanté Adams plays Canedy, a young New York journalist in the 90s who falls hard for Charles (Michael B Jordan): a sweet, idealistic guy in the US army who has no desire for her to abandon her career for him. So they are apart a lot when he is training, and then, tragically, seeing action in the
Middle East. The narrative jolts episodically back and forth between the early days of their relationship, their happiness living together and her grim and lonely widowhood and single-motherhood in which she has some supportive female
Friends and the regulation Gay Male Friend (very similar to the one in The Devil Wears Prada). There is a particularly jarring moment when Dana reacts to the
BREAKING story of 9/11 in the New York Times newsroom and then, before she or we have absorbed the horror of that, the story unsatisfyingly shifts to her life much later, an entirely different situation.