Review of Fetching Cody (2005) by J K — 31 Oct 2007

Now here was a fantastic little Canadian movie...

Art and Cody are madly in love. So much so in fact that they always do their best to get high together. Ok, so Cody hooks on the side so they can get money for rent, food and blow...but it is their relationship and they are madly in love...oh I said that already. Well you get the idea.

Then Art comes home to find Cody passed out. Soon he hears an ambulance and a knocking at the door. It is paramedics that had just received a 911 call that Cody has OD'd. They take her to the hospital and put her on life support. She is in a coma, organs are failing, and she is not expected to survive.

Art has a talk with a vagrant, Harvey, whom he is friends with. Harvey tells him that he found a time machine in the garbage. It looks like an old beat up recliner, covered with Christmas lights, but he assures Art that it is a real time machine.

So Art decides he is going to go back in time to when Cody drops out of school. He figures if he can convince her to not drop out, she might not become addicted to drugs, her life might turn out different, and she won't end up sick. So he travels back in time, to when Cody has her first period...on the volleyball court with a bunch of bully females. Then Cody keeps going back to the same moment in time to try to fix it. Often to funny results, he finally convinces her to not drop out of school. At the end of their meeting, he finds out that some event a year earlier, that her brother did, caused Cody a lot of issues.

Art gets the idea to travel back in time to find out what Cody's brother did. He kills himself with a gun. So Art tries several times (once agian, so a clever humorous effect) to convince her brother not to kill himself.

And the more Art finds out about Cody's life, the more he goes back to try to fix those bad moments. The earliest being when Cody was 8 years old and raped by a boy. Cody is rescued by Art.

Each time after trying to fix these events, Art comes back to the present to see if his changes in the past have made a difference...and each time they haven't made any difference at all. In fact, after rescuing her back when she was 8, he returns to find that Cody has died. He attends the funeral, and realizes that he himself is the problem.

Cody had become so dependant on Art that she blindly followed and listened to every single thing he said...she completely trusted him. She said it was love at first sight and she couldn't understand why. Now Art realized why...it was because at every bad moment in her life...Art was there.

So Cody realized what he must do. He must prevent the moment of when they first met. He sold drugs, so he had to prevent Cody from buying drugs from him on their first meeting.

He goes back in time...sees himself pushing drugs on the corner, and calls the cops. He gets himself (his younger self) arrested, and taken to jail. Then he sees Cody walking the street...right past where their first meeting would have been.

Art comes back to the present, and has no memory of Cody.

So in the end, he lost the one he loved...but in doing so saved her.

He decides there is nothing for him in Vancouver, so he heads to Seattle for a new start. And two seats in front of him is Cody. They dont' recognze each other. They don't know each other....and never fall in love. But they are both alive, and healthy.

A truly special story.