"Miss You Already" is destined to be compared to the mother of all weepies about female friendship and fatal disease, 1988's glorious "Beaches," though to be written off as such is to not give proper credit to its own, separate bittersweet values and achievements. Director Catherine Hardwicke, marrying the tougher sensibilities of 2003's "Thirteen" and 2005's "Lords of Dogtown" with the more commercial, formerly less successful likes of 2008's "Twilight" and 2011's "Red Riding Hood," takes a tough existential subject and treats it with the honesty and candidness it deserves. Melodrama slips in at times, but it is rarely saccharine, with screenwriter Morwenna Banks and actors Drew Barrymore (2014's "Blended") and Toni Collette (2014's "A Long Way Down") selling every turn of the plot even when the end game is exceedingly clear.
Ever since the American-born Jess (Drew Barrymore) moved with her family to London in 1986, she and Milly (Toni Collette) have been best friends. In the nearly thirty years since, they have forged their own paths into adulthood but remained virtually inseparable. Now in their thirties, PR executive Milly has become a wife to domesticized rocker Kit (Dominic Cooper) and a mother to young children Scarlett (Honor Kneafsey) and Ben (Ryan Baker), while Jess, an environmental planner, has struggled to conceive a child with oil-rig worker husband Jago (Paddy Considine). When Milly is diagnosed with breast cancer, she is suddenly faced for the first time with her own fragile mortality. Jess and Kit are there for her as she embarks on chemotherapy and attempts to put on a brave face for her kids, but circumstances only become more difficult when the radiation fails to work. For Milly, who has just learned she is pregnant, she is torn between celebrating her own happy occasion and the unimaginable prospect of losing her closest confidante.
See Dustin Putman, TheFilmFile.com. for full review
