LOVE STORY

Nepo Star, 31, Thrusts Herself Into A-Lister Status

After getting snubbed for “The Substance,” this just might be her ticket to next year’s Oscars.

Love of Your Life is a lush, tender romance that was once a commonplace Hollywood staple, but has become all-too rare these days. It’s so good it makes you long for the heyday of the romantic drama.

It also features a performance so impressive that Oscar voters are bound to take notice.

The film stars Margaret Qualley—the 31-year-old daughter of Andie MacDowell—as Maya. She works tirelessly as a nurse, and when she arrives at a house to buy an old bedside table, she meets Charlie (Gabriel Basso).

Their meet-cute sparks a whirlwind romance. Charlie was adopted as a kid and is extremely close with his family. Maya, on the other hand, never met her father, and her mother moved to Australia years ago. Except for her best friend Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger), she is completely alone and fiercely independent. But Charlie has changed her life: He is, as the title suggests, the love of her life.

Watching Maya and Charlie fall in love is as heartwarming as the inevitable tragedy is heartbreaking. The incident (which I won’t spoil here) sends Maya spiraling for years, and she takes off to Europe to try to regain some semblance of the person she once was. To pave over the cracks in her proverbial pavement, she travels the world looking for men to sleep with, as if to desperately cling to the love she once knew. It’s her Eat, Pray, Love moment—but far more effective

Qualley has been good for a long time. She was mightily impressive in the Netflix series Maid, was a delight in Drive-Away Dolls, and is tremendous in Sanctuary. She’s probably best known for her role in The Substance, which nearly landed her a career-first Oscar nomination.

Her work in Love of Your Life, which arrives in theaters Oct. 7 and will stream on Prime Video starting Oct. 14, is by some distance her finest to date. At least some credit goes to director Rachel Morrison (The Fire Inside) and screenwriter Julia Cox, who both do great work playing with genre tropes while simultaneously eschewing stereotypes. In doing so, Qualley crafts a rich portrait of grief and the struggle to stay afloat when everything feels designed to keep you down.

Through her hugely expressive eyes and quivering lip, we see a woman who once had everything—“I got the thing that everyone wants. I won the lottery,” she remarks—and is now trying to find a way to achieve some sort of sense of normalcy. In losing the love she had, she’s lost herself entirely. It’s emotionally challenging, but Qualley makes Maya incredibly lovable.

In the early scenes, we see Charlie shift her worldview and begin to understand there’s so much to life beyond herself. When she lights up, so does the audience watching. And when she closes herself off, we feel that pain acutely. To feel the fall, we must be compelled by the rise, and Qualley pulls it off wonderfully.

This isn’t an overly showy performance, either. Sure, there are moments of emotional breakdown, and Qualley’s tears are wrenching. But Morrison wisely avoids overly dramatic displays of emotion. The film explores grief as something that can fundamentally alter who you are. It can make you regress into a shell of yourself, and that’s where the film is often most powerful. There are so many emotional layers, from the thrill of discovering love to the tragedy of losing it, all the way to beginning to rebuild and love yourself again, that are all acutely examined here.

So what, exactly, are Qualley’s Oscar chances this time?

Admittedly, the Best Actress race this year is a fiercely crowded one. Obsession breakout Inde Navarette, Julianne Moore in The Debut, and Anne Hathaway in The Odyssey appear to be frontrunners. Yet the ferocious, wide-ranging competition makes this one of the most wide-open races in recent memory.

Festivals like TIFF—where Love of Your Life just premiered—exist to shake up the races. Qualley, coming off a high-profile split from music producer Jack Antonoff, is well admired in Hollywood, and her layered, complex performance in Morrison’s film is the kind of work we so rarely get in movies today. So many names are being thrown around, including Sandra Hüller, Renate Reinsve, Olivia Wilde, and Ruth Madeley, but Qualley is every bit as great as her competition.

Hollywood and the Academy struggle to resist a young up-and-coming star, and at just 31, Qualley has proven in Love of Your Life that she is a major talent. The fact that her performance exists in a movie this smart and winning makes it even better.

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Barry LevittFreelance Writer

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