Several years ago I saw Memento, a film in which a man (Guy Pearce) who suffers from short-term memory loss — memories more than a few hours old disappear like mist at noon — must somehow track down his wife’s killer. This Adam Sandler vehicle picks up the same gimmick and applies it to romance. ⁽¹⁾

Henry Roth (Sandler) is a vet with ambitions to take his boat to Alaska and study the life and habits of the walrus. On a trial run around the island, the mast topples and Roth must wait for the Coast Guard to tow him home. While waiting, he goes ashore in his dinghy to get some lunch at a local restaurant, the Hukilau. There he meets, and falls for, Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore). Sure, she says, she’ll have lunch with him the next day. But when he returns, she doesn’t recognize him, and the restaurant owner explains to Henry that Lucy was in a car wreck a few months back and suffered brain damage — and now, every night when she goes to sleep, she forgets what happened on the previous day. With the help of a perhaps overprotective father and brother, she’s now reliving the same day over and over again, the one that led up to the accident; anything new that pops up is promptly forgotten. As a result, if Henry wants to have any kind of relationship with Lucy, he must devote his life to making her meet and fall in love with him — over and over again, day after day.

A pleasant romance film. I expected that in the end Lucy would recover her short-term memory capability and the two would live happily ever after; I was, luckily, I think, only half right. Amusing roles by Rob Schneider (as Henry’s very weird friend Ula), Lusia Strus (as the androgynous Alexa) and Sean Astin (as Lucy’s steroid-hyped brother Doug). Major flaw: the womanizing Henry of the beginning of the film is not the Henry we see in the rest of the film; very little is made of this “reform” in Henry’s behavior, and the original Henry could just as well have been omitted.

But, all in all, a pleasant little film.