My Own Love Song

Olivier Dahan’s English-language debut, My Own Love Song follows two friends, Renée Zellweger’s wheelchair-bound Jane and Forest Whitaker’s dimwitted Joey, as they embark on a road trip to Memphis – where Jane hopes to meet the son she gave up for adoption more than a decade ago. Dahan has infused My Own Love Song with a deliberately-paced, almost oppressively off-kilter sensibility that does, at the outset, hold the viewer at arm’s length, and there’s little doubt that the film’s self-indulgent atmosphere initially threatens to render its positive attributes moot (eg Zellweger’s impressively commanding performance). It’s the strange-yet-compelling bond between Zellweger and Whitaker’s respective characters that inevitably compensates for the rampant quirkiness, with the film improving immeasurably as the two characters take off on their journey through America’s south. And although Dahan has peppered the proceedings with a handful of decidedly questionable sequences – eg Jane and Joey’s encounter with an unreasonably off-the-wall guitarist (Nick Nolte’s Caldwell) – My Own Love Song boasts an engaging midsection that benefits from the inclusion of several unexpectedly engrossing interludes (eg Jane belts out a moving rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”) By the time the house-sized animated birds show up, My Own Love Song has certainly established itself as a distinctly odd (yet oddly compelling) piece of work that’s destined to leave most viewers scratching their heads in confusion – although, by that same token, the film absolutely does work provided one is tuned into its extremely specific wavelength.

*** out of ****