Good intentions ooze throughout The Secret: Dare to Dream, a high-toned drama about a widow searching for happiness in the suburbs of New Orleans. Given that the widow’s Katie Holmes, a veteran of melancholy soap operas, The Secret offers plush comforts not ordinarily available in this genre. Smooth execution, a better-than-necessary script, and a low-key tone help make this as comforting as a porch swing.
Loosely based on what press notes call the “groundbreaking best-selling book The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret: Dare to Dream boasts a strong pedigree. Director and co-writer Andy Tennant did Sweet Home Alabama, co-scripter Bekah Brustetter works on This Is Us, and Holmes has honed her appeal in projects large and small: Dawson’s Creek, Go, Batman Begins, Pieces of April, Ray Donovan. A true star, she is an always beguiling presence.
Holmes plays Miranda Wells, a put-upon widowed mother of three struggling with debt and adolescents. Missy (Sarah Hoffmeister), about to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, feels pressure from wealthier classmates; sickly Greg (Aidan Pierce Brennan) misses his inventor father; and young Bess (Chloe Lee) has pretty ordinary fears and some cutesy “unfiltered” laugh lines.
Flashbacks will reveal more about Miranda’s husband, but The Secret remains focused squarely on her. As the movie opens she has been left in the lurch with a falling-down house and no prospects in sight. Tucker (Jerry O’Connell), the nice-guy owner of a seafood restaurant, wants to help Miranda by marrying her, but settles for letting her manage his operations. Mother-in-law Bobby (Celia Weston) is around to offer unwanted advice, mostly about selling her house and settling down with an okay if not stellar boyfriend.
Everything changes, including the weather, when Bray Johnson (Josh Lucas) arrives. Soft-spoken and courtly to a fault, he wants to tell Miranda The Secret, but is delayed by Hurricane Hazel and his Southern sensitivity. Ingratiating himself into the family, he offers gnomic advice (“Are you a Buddhist?” Missy asks), rights all the kids’ wrongs, and repairs the house when a tree crashes through the roof.
Understandably threatened, Tucker puts up a fuss. So does Bobby, who uncovers a Secret about Bray’s background as Vanderbilt University professor. But Miranda and Bray fall in love, hesitantly, carefully, and for the genre pretty realistically.
I write “for the genre” fully aware that Hallmark romances have set the current standard for the form. Heroine a little past her prime, bruised and even battered by life, unwilling to give love another try. Throw in some career impediments, bills holding her back, a dreamboat competing with Mr. Drab, some last-minute twists (this one borrows from the old Louvin Brothers’ weeper “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby”), and you’ve got a good approximation of the Hallmark style, currently in endless rotation streaming and on cable.
The formula works well because it leads to an either/or rather than if/then ending. What makes The Secret so effective is how deeply it mires Miranda in her problems. She really doesn’t have a solution other than to Dare to Dream, which approach gets most people nowhere. The sight of Holmes sitting on a sofa in the dark crying softly to herself puts The Secret on a level of honesty most Hallmarks avoid like a virus.
Miranda also engages in actual conversations with Bray, conversations about what does and doesn’t work, about what hurts and what doesn’t. These gentle, quietly probing moments seem just like how these two characters would start a relationship, and are especially welcome in a story about second chances.
You can’t quite forget that this is a Katie Holmes vehicle, and most viewers know that no matter how rocky her path, her fate is never seriously in doubt. The only question to The Secret is how far the filmmakers are willing to stretch plausibility to get to that ending. The movie may scratch up against the unlikely, but viewers can feel confident that they are in the hands of pros who know what they’re doing.
Available from Lionsgate on PVOD.
