Only You

Over New Year's, all of the TCM presenters got together to present some movies that they hadn't seen before deciding they'd show this night's lineup and talk about it. Among the movies they ran was one that was new to me, too: Only You.

The movie starts off with an establishing sequence of a couple of kids playing at a ouija board: Faith Corvatch, her brother Larry, and Faith's best friend Kate. They spell out the name "Damon Bradley". Some years later, before becoming an adult, Faith goes to a carnival where a fortune teller tells her she's going to meet a man named Damon Bradley and marry him.

Of course, that's all nonsense. Fast-forward to where they're all adults. Kate (Bonnie Hunt) has gotten married to Larry (Fisher Stevens), while Faith (Marisa Tomei) is engaged to be married to a podiatrist named Dwayne. But we wouldn't have a movie if something didn't happen here. Faith finds out that Dwayne, who doesn't know Faith's superstition about Damon Bradley, in fact had a classmate named Damon Bradley. Said Damon Bradley is supposed to be flying to Italy that day. So Faith, being a completely rational woman any guy would want to marry, figures that the thing to do would be to jilt Dwayne and get on a plane to Italy in the hopes of finding the Damon Bradley who she believes she's fated to marry. Not only that, but she's able to get Kate to join her and leave her husband in the lurch, because reasons.

That's not much to go on, and as you might expect Faith doesn't find Damon. But it's the sort of situation that's ripe for somebody who'd want to scam her. So sure enough, she just magically runs into a guy who identifies himself to her as Damon Bradley (Robert Downey Jr.) This is of course a lie. The guy is actually named Peter, but, having seen Faith, fell in love with her, so when he overhears that she's looking for a guy named Damon Bradley, decides to claim that's his name. And for the period of time that Faith believes Peter is in fact Damon, she too is in love with him.

Now, you may be asking yourself why anyone would want to stay in love with a woman who clearly shows hershelf to be incredibly shallow. And yet Peter still loves Faith, to the point that he comes up with another fake Damon Bradley (Billy Zane) and travels all around Italy with Faith and Kate so that Faith can find this fake Damon and learn that this isn't the person she should be in love with. Complicating matters it the fact that Kate is being pursued by the sort of suave European who populates movies like this, or certainly did a generation or two earlier when travel to Europe wasn't quite so easy.

You can probably guess who winds up together in the final reel, and part of what makes Only You a bit of a slog is the fact that it takes so long to get to the predictable ending. Everybody tries, and it's not the fault of the cast by any means. They're hindered by a sub-par formulaic script that frankly insults the viewers' intelligence. There's some nice cinematography of Italy, but the movie as a whole doesn't quite work.