Daisy is not much better, though Ronan is much more talented and as such, it’s less obvious, but she’s presented as cripplingly neurotic, socially inept, rude and vaguely alternative. She is, essentially, the American as seen by non-Americans. Another caricature. Who seems to have some vaguer-still supernatural thought process that is fleetingly addressed and quickly forgotten. Box ticked. The rest of the film’s characters operate around these two in varying degrees of effectiveness, but as far as Macdonald is concerned, they’re largely irrelevant. This isn’t so much a film about character development, or that great journey one must undertake to emerge in some way new or other. This is a film that strives to and succeeds in making fun of Twilight and its legacy, on two entirely separate fronts.
Yes, the obvious as outlined above is what a lot of people are going to cotton on to, and maybe even in a way that passes overhead and is dismissed on face value as theft or, worse yet, inspiration. What little enjoyment I was able to take away from the film came in its second half, in which the young lovers are separated by the military and things focus squarely on Daisy and baby sister elect, Piper. While working in labour camps under the foster care of the undeveloped Major and his wife, Daisy falls asleep wistfully intoning to the stars that Eddie wait for her, before dreaming of the two in progressive stages of undress in the woods in trouble. Not having known him so long, her devotion is inherently comical and as exaggerated as the high passion of the films How I Live Now expertly lampoons. She soon escapes and makes her way across damn near a whole country in hopes of reunion, along the way looking after sweet little Piper, narrowly avoiding violation at the hands of your common or garden post-apocalyptic marauders and even killing a man as a means to an end. Or as part of what I guess counts as character development, in that she develops from a character who’d get voted “least likely to kill a guy” into a character who certifiably kills a guy
Where this gets us is, predictably, to the reunion (with the aid of that super-romantic and super-symbolic hawk from earlier) and the revelation that Eddie’s seen some pretty serious shit and suffered something fierce. He is lost in the throes of traumatic breakdown. While Daisy’s travels have been visibly traumatic, love kept her going. Despite the threat of rape, the hopelessness of being lost in the wilderness and the change of soul that comes with taking a life, her love keeps her strong and sane enough so that she’s ready to go right back to how things were.
For Eddie, the older, broodier, maler of the two, love wasn’t worth a damn. Turned inward, he is incapable of communication and their bond is severed. This is How I Love Now’s message, bleak and awful and nothing like the message that other franchise peddles that not even death can conquer love. Love is fragile, human, and fleeting. It is breakable and cold and romance and the romantic is a by-product that counts for absolutely nothing.
The film’s ending isn’t entirely without hope, but it does end with Daisy doting in ignorant bliss that the mentally shattered Eddie will some day return to normality. What it doesn’t do is pander to its audience, but neither does it really know what it wants to do. It is not a confident film, though it has a confident declamation. Don’t misread me – I’m not saying its singular function is to satirize what teenage romance fiction has come to represent, but that it what it does best. For some time yet to come, teenage drama is doomed to comparison thanks to how Stephanie Meyer briefly shaped the world.
Sadly, How I Live Now partially succeeds at the expense of coherence, leaping from one extreme to the other with a fair amount of padding that does its characters, The Cow Whisperer and the American Flower, no real justice beyond serving them up to the cynics and standing back in satisfaction.
