50 First Dates

The engine of Peter Segal’s film is the household routine, not the romance: a father and a brother restage the same day each morning, and the cost of that upkeep stays on screen. The close does not cure Lucy, it formalises the workaround into a tape she watches on waking, making the resolution administrative rather than medical. Crude gags sit inside the same shots as the caretaking, with no separation between registers. Hawaii is a structural choice rather than scenery, since a repeating day needs open ground to look different each time. The script began as a Seattle drama set largely in a cafe and titled “Fifty First Kisses”, and the studio changed it once marketing found the word kisses was putting male viewers off; Adam Sandler then rewrote it as comedy and moved it to the islands. Clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale wrote in the British Medical Journal in 2004 that the condition shown here corresponds to nothing in neurology or psychiatry. Even so, a Bronx care home started a morning video programme for residents with early dementia in 2015, citing this film as its model. A good fit if you accept an ending that is a procedure repeated daily rather than a recovery. Not a fit if you cannot take slapstick landing in the middle of a caretaking scene.