The Vow (2012) <Netflix>
IMDB: A car accident puts Paige in a coma, and when she wakes up with severe memory loss, her husband Leo works to win her heart again.
TLB: Wife started this up, then asked me to watch with her (so I sat in the same room, played on my phone, and called it 'Date Night'). Reminded me of 50 first dates, but this was most certainly not a comedy and took a much more serious approach to the situation of a wife losing her memory of who this man is claiming to be her husband. Channing Tatum played the patient husband, and we were brought through his emotional turmoil of missing the woman he fell in love with, trying to get her to remember what they had, but also at the same time trying to give her time and space to recover and figure it out for herself - forcing the situation wouldn't be productive in the long run, and he knows it. Meanwhile, Rachel McAdams ain't hard on the eyes as the wife. From her perspective, all memory is wiped out going back to a point in history before she ever met Tatum. In fact, she is far enough back to not know of the falling out she had with her family and friends, her total self-determined transformation that made her into the person Tatum found and married. So, he is trying to be supportive, even going to dinner with her family, all the while knowing she hated these people and how much they tried to control her life. The family, seizing on this opportunity to have Rachel back, start once again to shape her into the person they wanted her to be.
Over time, several of the family skeletons start falling out of the closets, and she realizes thier image isn't who she wants to be, and she begins to rediscover the interests that drew her away from them originally. Spoiler, but she doesn't get her memory back nor does she return to the person Tatum met and married, but she does once again break away from her family and go in her own direction, one that is open to getting to know Tatum again and explore what that life, that persona of her own choosing, might be like.
Final: 8/10. Very good/solid date night movie, chicks will love it. Your date will likely cry a bit, but you won't get yelled at for things the actors do in the movie. Decent supporting cast, but really focused on these two individuals, and about figuring out how/if they fit together going forward when one person has no recollection at all of who they used to be.