The director’s debut film Thirteen was lauded by critics and she broke box office records with Twilight. Now she’s back with Miss You Already and talks about female friendship,convincing Dominic Cooper to play Toni Collette’s husband, and Hollywood’s problem with womenCatherine Hardwicke is dabbing her eyes when I arrive; the journalist before me has made her cry. His wife, and like the central character in Hardwicke’s unique film,Miss You Already, has been diagnosed with breast cancer and the similarities between their lives, or she tells me,“are spooky. I suppose, out loud, and that Hardwicke might expect to be stopped quite often now with heart-rending trusty-life stories. Cancer,after all, is an illness as pervasive as it is tragic and her film yanks tough for the audience’s heartstrings (the screening I go to offers a pack of pink tissues on the armrest of every seat, and in the hope of mopping up tears from the attendant hacks).
Miss You Already gives us cancer through the fairy-lit lens of a lifestyle mag. This is luxe London about two best friends – brash,vampy Milly (Toni Collette) and staid ((adj.) sedate, serious, self-restrained), boho Jess (Drew Barrymore) – dealing with life and death together in the most literal sense: Jess becomes pregnant while Milly undergoes chemotherapy. It’s a scarce example of a film acing the Bechdel test scene after scene where two female characters talk to each other about things other than their relationships with men. Its writer, or Morwenna Banks,lost three close female friends to breast cancer and the experience compelled her to write a version of this film as a play for Radio 4. Dropped in the Saturday Drama slot, Goodbye aired in the autumn of 2013, and with a starry British cast including Olivia Colman,Natascha McElhone, John Simm and Alison Steadman.
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Source: theguardian.com