Review of I Love You, I Love You Not (1996) by Lizzie S — 06 Nov 2011

Holy mother of God. First, know this. I LOVE Jude Law. Jude can do no wrong in my eyes. The only reason I watched this was because of Jude Law; he's also the only reason I gave it any stars. I found the whole thing to be far-fetched and implausible; Jews in New York are about as exotic as oranges in Florida, yet here they make it seem like, in this day & age--especially in New York----????--yes, that's right--- NEW YORK--that Jews are ostracized and looked down upon simply based on their heritage. The grandmother I could sympathize with, but I found the Claire Danes character utterly neurotic and unconvincingly overwrought over the Holocaust issue. Yes, it was a horrible thing, and yes, her grandmother lived through it. (I have to admit, I DID really like the grandmother. She was cool & beyond awesome; too bad the same couldn't have been said of her granddaughter.) There in lies my weariness over her entire character; her GRANDMOTHER lived through it--SHE didn't. I understand the granddaughter being upset over all of this, but to have nightmares, envisioning all of these things that her grandmother went through and living vicariously in the past this way really grated on my nerves after a while.

I felt bad for the Jude character simply because he WAS a good guy, not a bigot or anti-Semite as one reviewer lightly mentioned on here--he just eventually tired of her morose & toxic personality. I can totally understand why ANY guy would lose interest in a girl like this---having NOTHING to do with her ethnicity or religion. He was simply fed up with having to listen to her talk about & dwell on NOTHING but her grandmother & depressing topics and not wanting to find more uplifting conversations or things to do together. NOBODY wants to be around someone like that on a consistent basis because they drag YOU down, whether they're Jewish, gentile, or anything else.

I found her "sad eyes" that everyone keeps mentioning in this story non-existent & kept looking at her trying to see what was so sad about them. They're not sad so much as bored to tears. Which is what I would have been had it not been for: A. Jude Law; B. The fact that I was too irritated to be bored over the fact that I wasted time on this thinking it would be a half-way decent movie. Whoever wrote the "sad eyes" thing into the script & insisted on making a big deal of it did a poor job of trying to illustrate this in the movie. All I saw about this character was that she flipped out for little reason at all and that she seemed, overall, like one big, depressing pity-party. The whole scene with her standing on a friggin' train track holding a freaking flower with an oncoming locomotive speeding towards her (& having hallucinations of herself meeting her grandmother as a young girl---ALSO played by Danes--walking towards each other with a flower) while she's having a major pity party didn't move me in the slightest. It was just stupid and pointless. The "sad, shy, sensitive" deal with her was too much to choke down about half way through the movie, even tho I really did hope that she'd end up being happy with the Jude character. In the end, I didn't feel sorry for her at all and came to the conclusion that she lost him because she just wasn't willing to let go of whatever neurosis made her want to keep dwelling on her grandmother's past and couldn't move into her OWN life with a nice boyfriend. Bottom line--she drove him away, when it would have been real simple to keep him around if she would have at least tried to see the positive things about life and stop thinking she had it so rough.

Unless you're a die-hard Jude Law fan (which obviously, I AM in order to have sat through nearly an hour & 1/2 of this...) skip this. Unless you're just naturally masochistic, in which case by all means, go for it.