Released: December 9,2007
Director: Lloyd Kramer
*****
For One More Day comes to us from the Mitch Albom factory and as such, contains enough schmaltz and sap for a dozen Christmas-themed movies. Ostensibly, the story wants to be about a former baseball player trying to commit suicide after one too many real life disasters and is visited by his dead mother for, you guessed it, one more day. Albom is a sportswriter turned novelist with Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, both of which are fine novels lacking a certain something in the television adaptation. Is this a bad production? Certainly not. Ellen Burstyn and Michael Imperioli make sure of that. But it tends to be a trite story with too pat an ending designed to make everyone happy.
We're introduced to Charles (Imperioli) as he is drunk as a skunk and ready to put a gun to his head. When his dead mother shows up, he relives important parts of his life (a wife and daughter are suspiciously left out). We see what makes him the depressed man he is today: an overbearing father and, to a lesser extent, a mother who tried too hard. We're also thrown for a loop when a supposed sports reporter begins to talk to him, with the final reveal at the end being this woman is his grown up daughter, writing the story her father has told her.
Broadcast on ABC late last year, For One More Day contains more than a fair share of commercials in the second hour, breaking up any kind of momentum the story can manage to generate. It's also trite in a way movies tend not to be in our current day and age. As if everything can be made better when one party has so egregiously harmed another. Sometimes it works in the real world, but more often than not, no matter how good the performances, the entire endeavor veers toward a cliched movie of the week. (Which is exactly what this is in the end.)
Scenes involving Burstyn and Imperioli work because there seems to be a genuine chemistry between the two. But Albom can't resist adding sugar to the top, making everything okay by the end credits. Relationships and lives are fixed within a 90 minute time frame without being witness to any of the work, cheating the audience out building any sense of sympathy for Charlie. It takes far too long to get to the eventual ending since the screenplay wastes time with small scenes between Charlie and Maria, recounting the story. Without them, there would be a chance to see how the two reconnected in the first place or some semblance of a rift between Charlie and his wife. But the story can't be without its schmaltz.