One common mishap that befalls people and their smartphones is dropping them, leading to the glass screens cracking. This is something I pride myself on never letting happen . . . while currently typing on a computer with a seam running through the middle of the mouse pad, the result of the machine inadvertently slipping from my lap.  This is a small part of today’s film, Love at First Sight.  The main theme it explores is fate.  It is a romantic comedy, and usually such films focus on the dynamics of the relationship rather than the forces that bring people together, like accidents with your cell phone.  While I take issue with some of what it has to say on the issue of fate, I have to confess to enjoying it all the same, and I thank my friend who recommended it.

The first event that leads to Love at First Sight is when Hadley Sullivan (Haley Lu Richardson) misses her flight to London, England.  Though she is perpetually late, another factor is that she is traveling on one of the busiest days of the year for airports, December 20^th.  The reason she has joined the masses taking to the air is that her father, Andrew Sullivan (Rob Delaney), is getting married to Charlotte (Katrina Nare).  Charlotte, by the way, is not Hadley’s mother.  Andrew had divorced Hadley’s mother shortly after he moved to England to teach poetry at Oxford.  Hadley is a little upset about the whole affair and does not want to like this new woman marrying her dad.  Since she is forced to wait, Hadley does what so many in airports these days do: charge her cell phone.  This is how she meets Oliver Jones (Ben Hardy) when he offers to let her borrow his power chord.  This leads to them spending the next few hours with each other, which is extended when they end up on the same flight to London.  Further, his seatbelt is inoperable, and he is sat next to her for their transatlantic trip.  It is during this trek that they truly fall in love, though I suppose the title does give away this eventuality.  They have much in common, not the least of which is being young, and their opposites are complementary.  And they almost kiss, but stop short of it.  After they land and Hadley is forced to go through customs, Oliver takes her routinely low powered mobile and inputs his telephone number before allowing himself to be ushered into his proper area.  She then proceeds to drop her phone, splintering the screen, and leading to the loss of her remaining charge.  Do you see why I take pride in my perfect record on these matters?  Hadley frets about the loss of the number, though makes it to the wedding with minutes to spare and enough time to get changed into her bridesmaid dress.  With a four-hour interlude between ceremony and reception, her thoughts once again turn to Oliver.  While discussing a potential father-daughter dance later, she overhears a couple talking about a memorial they have to attend.  The details sound a lot like what Oliver had described to Hadley, so she decides to take a chance and go to it.  He, too, had been wondering about her, and his waiting for her in the airport is interrupted by his brother, Luther Jones (Tom Taylor), coming to take him to their event.  Please note that this is not your typical wake.  Tessa Jones (Sally Phillips), Oliver’s mom, has terminal cancer.  Instead of waiting until she dies, she decides that she wants to have a Shakespearean themed service so that she can hear all the kind things people have to say about her.  This is the scene into which a confused Hadley enters, being first introduced to Tessa and Val Jones (Dexter Fletcher), Oliver’s father.  It is at this moment that Oliver spots Hadley, and they go off to have their private conversation.  During it, he continues to hide behind the statistics he likes to quote instead of talking about his true feelings.  When she points this out to him, he wonders why he would be open to somebody he had just met on an airplane.  This leads to a rather hasty retreat for her, and he immediately regrets the words that drove her away.  While she proceeds to get lost trying to figure out how to get back to the reception, he finds that she had forgotten her backpack.  In other words, he has an excuse to make up for the brusqueness he had exhibited.  The clincher comes when he finally gives his eulogy and realizes that he had filled it with a load of statistics, proving what she had said about him to be true.  Thus, with a little encouragement from his parents, and a ride from Luther, Oliver sets off for the reception.  Hadley had gotten there by calling her dad to come get her.  He does this, with Charlotte in tow, but before they go, they have it out about why he did not fight for her mother.  He tells her that they had both stopped working at their relationship, and since they had been apart it had been time to move on.  The bit about not putting in the effort shows Hadley that she had given up on Oliver too quickly.  Yet, there is nothing to do in the moment but return to the reception, which had been on hold until their arrival.  She settles in to enjoy it, though with a note of wistfulness over her missed opportunity.  She gives herself the time to feel this by taking in the air on a balcony overlooking the entrance to the building in which the reception is being held.  Given the Shakespeare themed memorial from which Oliver is coming, I expecedt a reenactment of the famous exchange between Romeo and Juliet.  Instead, they see each other as she is coming downstairs and go to embrace each other.  As we pan out and move towards the end credits, the narrator (Jameela Jamil) gives us some numbers about the life the two are about to spend together.

The narrator in Love at First Sight provides an interesting entrée into my Catholic discussion.  Not only does she provide a voice contextualizing what you are seeing, but she also has her hand upon the events.  She plays a number of different characters that gently guide Hadley and Oliver towards one another.  In the Christian sense, one could look at this as a sort of Guardian Angel, which, if you are protestant and not comfortable with such things, are God’s way of intervening in our lives.  However, let us relate this all to what the movie wants to call “fate.”  Fate poses a problematic theological question.  If there is one thing that Christian thinkers have largely agreed upon from the beginning, it is that God has given us free will.  At the same time, if we do have agency, how can such an idea be compatible with events over which we have no control?  Why stop with this possible philosophical dilemma?  Consider also how faith asks that we acknowledge that we are not the center of our own existence, something that would seem granted by the fact that we do have free will.  In other words, this is all complicated.  The issue with the concept of fate, at least as the film would have it, is that it is something unknowable and not a discreet event.  Oddly, what unfolds speaks more to this concept than what we would traditionally think of as fate.  Yes, Hadley and Oliver were destined to meet each other, though this might have just as easily not have happened.  In the meantime, like God so often does in our lives if we only would recognize Him, the narrator is there to make His will known.  Either Hadley or Oliver could have ignored the feelings tugging at them, which can also be a sign that God is trying to tell you something.  Or not.  Such things are tricky, which is why spiritual directors are helpful.  In any case, they had the free will to act contrary to God’s plan.  What we have here is an alignment between God and man, and it is beautiful, as always.

I suppose I could have put the discussion of Love at First Sight more succinctly by highlighting the quote from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1865), which asks whether it is better to have loved and lost, or never to have loved at all.  It is a familiar refrain in Western culture, and speaks to the notion of free will.  The answer is to always to choose love, no matter the potential pitfalls, in all its forms, because God is love.  For these reasons, this film gets my recommendation.