THEN CAME YOU

Stars: Craig Ferguson, Kathie Lee Gifford, Ford Kiernan, Phyllida Law and Elizabeth Hurley.
Writer: Kathie Lee Gifford
Director: Adriana Trigiani

Rating: ★ ★ ★

In what feels like, for most of its running time, two old friends having a lark in the Scottish countryside finds just enough heart and honesty at key moments to keep Then Came You from being just a sweetly disposable confection. Craig Ferguson, exuding true leading man charisma, shares genuine chemistry with co-lead and scripter Kathie Lee Gifford…which is fortunate, because it’s all the narrative really asks of them.

In an all-too-rare bigscreen outing, Ferguson transposes his stand-up/talkshow persona into the role of Howard Awd, a widower overseeing a lochside estate that was once his home but is now a guesthouse. With his best mate Gavin (Ford Kiernan, delivering the goods in that rom-com staple role), Awd is struggling to keep alive the memory of his late wife by maintaining the magnificent but increasingly dilapidated manor (shot at the picturesque Ardkinglas House in the Scottish coastal hamlet of Cairndow).

Into Awd’s life comes Annabelle Wilson, a Nantucket widow carrying her late husband’s ashes in an empty chocolate box (because her husband’s favourite movie was Forrest Gump, in the first of many movie references that include Titanic, The Way We Were and, amusingly, Braveheart). As Annabelle, Gifford is no Streep but she certainly does all she has to do to convince as a likable fish-out-of-water Yank with a little dark cloud over her soul.

From the moment she’s off the train and in Awd’s care, the pair are giggling and bonding and bickering like a couple of silver-haired teenagers. This almost becomes too much of a good thing, until Ferguson brings the acting chops in a scene where he fronts up about the true nature of his own grief. It’s a relatively brief sequence but it is all the film needs to provide enough grounded emotion in the pic’s second half.

Despite sharing above-the-title credit, Elizabeth Hurley (more breathtakingly beautiful than ever) has only a handful of scenes as Awd’s fiancee; the great Phyllida Law pulls of a thankless role as the pivot of a subplot that never rings true. Adriana Trigiani, ably directing her first feature since the undervalued 2014 melodrama Big Stone Gap, unloads large passages of exposition via disembodied dialogue; Annabelle’s reason for being in Scotland is plonked down by an off-camera Gifford as the pair drive around the stunning countryside (the hardest working crew member was the drone pilot, without a doubt). 

That’s not a big deal, as narrative is secondary to niceties in this type of mature-age romantic fantasy. With two seasoned performers outfront, clearly comfortable in each other’s company, Then Came You will nicely serve the Senior’s Club ticket holders seeking postcard locales and personable dramedy.