50 First Dates (Happy Madison Productions, Anonymous Content, Flower Films, Columbia, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, March 28) my husband Charles and I ran a 20-year-old movie from the DVD backlog: 50 First Dates, directed by Peter Segal (who before this was mostly a director of comedy series entries like Nutty Professor 2: The Klumpps and Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult) from a script by George Wing. 50 First Dates stars Adam Sandler as Henry Roth, a hapless veterinarian at a Hawai’ian theme park called Sea Life in Oahu who burns through women like Kleenex until he meets one that really turns his crank. She is Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore, granddaughter of John Barrymore – and the resemblance is quite apparent in her close-ups), who about a year and a half before the main story begins was involved in a car accident with her father, Marlin Whitmore (Blair Clark). He was relatively unscathed but she suffered a permanent brain injury that practically eliminated her short-term memory. According to her doctor, Dr. Keats (Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters veteran Dan Aykroyd in a coolly effective performance), every night as she sleeps her brain essentially reboots itself and wipes out all memories of what happened all day. Her long-term memory is unaffected but she’s essentially frozen in time: since the accident happened on her father’s birthday, dad and her brother Doug (Sean Astin, biological son of actress Patty Duke and stepson of actor John Astin) have to re-enact the events of that day every day, including baking him a birthday cake (which they almost immediately throw away) and giving him a present, a videotape of the film The Sixth Sense, which they watch and have to pretend to be surprised at its famous trick ending. They’ve also stockpiled copies of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser for the day of her accident to reinforce her illusion that it’s still the same day the accident occurred, and every day they have to whitewash the walls of one of the rooms in their house because just before the accident Lucy had been painting the white walls with murals of flowers, particularly lilies (her favorite).

Marlin and Doug do all they can to make sure Henry and Lucy don’t fall in love lest the stresses of an actual relationship blow the delicate balance in her life. Henry tries to avoid them by staging fake accidents of his own and leaving himself stranded in various out-of-the-way situations so the good-hearted Lucy can “rescue” him from them, including one in which his sidekick from the theme park, Ula (Rob Schneider), stages a mock attack on him and she literally won’t leave him alone. She catches up to him, knocks him down and repeatedly kicks him, reopening a fearsome wound Ula got when a shark attacked him despite Henry’s repeated assurances that sharks never attack humans unless the humans did something to bother them first. Through much of its running time the film seems like a bizarre mash-up of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Groundhog Day and one of my all-time favorite films, Good Bye, Lenin! (a German film from 2003 in which the gimmick was the central character’s mother was devoted to the socialist ideals proclaimed by the former East Germany, and her son and his best friend surround her with props so when she returns home after an eight-month coma she won’t realize that East Germany no longer exists and the West basically staged a friendly takeover of the East). It also seems like the sort of screwball comedy that was sensationally popular in the late 1930’s, and indeed one could readily imagine a 1930’s version of this premise with Cary Grant and Carole Lombard. 50 First Dates is essentially a one-joke movie, though Segal and Wing are able to get a lot of neat variations on that one joke, including one in which Henry and Lucy actually spend the night together in the same bed after (presumably) having sex, only in the morning she not only has no memory of him but reacts violently to the presence of a strange man in her bed and assaults him with a lacrosse stick.

The careful schemes of Marlin and Doug Whitmore to keep Lucy in the dark about what year it is and what’s going on in the rest of the world unravel in a quite ingenious way. A traffic cop writes her a ticket, saying that the registration on her car – a yellow Volkswagen “Thing” (a vehicle originated during World War II by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche; it was the German equivalent of the Jeep and its big advantage is that if it tipped over, it was so light the crew running it could simply tip it over and get it right side up) – is expired. She says it’s still current and won’t need to be renewed for another few months. He writes her a ticket which she, of course, tears up. Henry makes a videotape (though the DVD format had existed for nearly a decade when this movie was made – my husband Charles and I first saw The Sixth Sense on a DVD we bought the day the film came out – it’s totally ignored in this movie) showing Lucy what her life has been like. The two inevitably fall in love and start a relationship, though she breaks up with him because she fears she’s keeping him away from a planned trip to Alaska to study the underwater behavior of walruses. To accomplish this trip, Henry and Ula have rebuilt an old yacht they call the Sea Serpent – the obvious patches on the sails of this craft tell us all we need to know about its overall seaworthiness, or lack of same – only Lucy ends up on board. By the time the film ends they’ve not only got married but have a five-year-old daughter, Nicole, and of course Henry has to keep reminding Lucy who Nicole is and that she is their child.

50 First Dates has some quite funny gags that aren’t part of the main story, including one in which Henry is treating a Sea Life walrus for stomachaches, and it pukes all over his androgynous assistant Alexa (Lusia Strus), a rare example of a sympathetically portrayed Transgender character in a film this (relatively) early. (Lusia Strus’s pronoun on their imdb.com page is “she,” by the way, though writer Wing keeps us so much in doubt about the character’s gender identity we can go either way on the question, “Is he or isn’t she?”) Though I think Charles liked 50 First Dates a bit more than I did – at least I’m guessing that from the number of times he laughed – he told me something after the movie that flabbergasted me: he’d literally been in tears as the movie ended. When I asked him why, he told me that during my health crisis in December 2021 – first my heart attack, then my open-heart surgery and the two strokes I had the day after the operation – Charles had been worried that I might lose my memory and come to literally not knowing who he was. So this film hit quite close to home for him on a decidedly personal level!