The Last Letter From Your Lover opens with a quote from Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and the movie aims for a similar epic scope with its generation-spanning romance story. But author Jojo Moyes, who wrote the 2012 source novel, isn't Ernest Hemingway. Unfortunately, The Last Letter From Your Lover only occasionally captures the sense of classic Hollywood romance that its director Augustine Frizzell wanted to portray.

The Last Letter From Your Lover begins in London in 1965. Upper-class housewife Jennifer Stirling (Shailene Woodley) is returning home from the hospital. As the scars on her face indicate, Jennifer is recovering from a serious car accident, and as a result, she has lost most of her memory. Her husband (Joe Alwyn) has to remind her that she calls him Larry, not Lawrence, and everything in her home, including her housekeeper, is unfamiliar to her.

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The film relies on a dual mystery for its narrative -- showing Jennifer piecing together her past while 40 or so years later journalist Ellie Haworth (Felicity Jones) stumbles across a love letter to "J" from someone named "Boot." Ellie finds the letter in the newspaper's archives while researching another story, and becomes consumed with the idea of discovering the identities of the lovers and tracking them down. In 1965, Jennifer discovers the same letter tucked into her copy of Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop, which features a character named Boot.

Joe Alwyn in The Last Letter From Your Lover

This last letter from Jennifer's lover implores her to meet him at the train station so they can run away together. It's obvious that Jennifer's accident occurred while she was on the way to do just that. Larry has taken advantage of her amnesia to hide the evidence of her affair, and she has to do her own digging to find out the truth, while Ellie does similar digging in the future. However, it's not much of a mystery since the movie reveals his identity fairly quickly.

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Nabhaan Rizwan and Felicity Jones in The Last Letter From Your Lover

The narrative structure of The Last Letter From Your Lover is lopsided. The film devotes most of its time to the elegant tragedy of Jennifer and Anthony's doomed affair, which gives Frizzell the chance to showcase gorgeous period detail in costumes and locations. Ellie's story is comparatively pedestrian and dull, and her budding romance with archivist Rory (Nabhaan Rizwan) has none of the grandeur of Jennifer and Anthony's illicit tryst.

Jennifer is trapped in a loveless marriage with a condescending jerk, while Ellie is a free spirit who seems to have some minor commitment issues. Early on, the movie cuts from Jennifer in bed with Larry as he reminds her of his name to Ellie in bed with a random one-night stand whose name she can't recall. It's a real stretch to see any parallels between the two, though, and The Last Letter From Your Lover never achieves the cross-generational romantic scope of something like The Notebook or last year's similarly structured The Photograph.

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Even within Jennifer's more classically romantic story, the emotions are muted. Although she at least isn't called upon to affect an English accent, Woodley is still miscast as the repressed high-society housewife -- whose line readings are often stilted. She and Turner have very little chemistry and the most passionate part of their relationship is glossed over in a montage. The obstacles that the couple faces in their efforts to be together become almost comical as the movie progresses, especially once Ellie reaches out to them in the present day.

Frizzell's first film as a writer and director was the hilarious, exuberant 2018 stoner comedy Never Goin' Back, which felt like the debut of a bold new voice. In contrast, The Last Letter From Your Lover (written not by Frizzell, but by Nick Payne and Esta Spalding) is glossy and impersonal, with no distinctive stylistic touches. While Never Goin' Back celebrated the joys of female friendship and solidarity, The Last Letter From Your Lover keeps its female main characters at a distance from each other, both chronologically and thematically, with no sense of how either one could draw strength or inspiration from the other. And their bland male love interests never provide the passionate counterpoints that the story calls for.

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At least The Last Letter From Your Lover is less shamelessly manipulative than the last Jojo Moyes adaptation, 2016's Me Before You, and it earns its occasional emotional catharsis. Those emotional releases are too minimal and infrequent to generate the kind of swooning intensity that a romantic drama like this needs to be satisfying.

Starring Shailene Woodley, Felicity Jones, Callum Turner, Nabhaan Rizwan and Joe Alwyn, The Last Letter From Your Lover premieres Friday, July 23 on Netflix.

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