Sweet November (2001)

Sweet November arrives in 2001 as a remake of a 1968 romance and carries the older film's central bargain forward with a straight face. A San Francisco advertising executive named Nelson, played by Keanu Reeves, loses his job and his girlfriend on the same afternoon, then moves in with a stranger who promises to improve him over the course of a single month. Charlize Theron plays Sara, a woman of unspecified income who keeps a dog, a neighbor, and a rotating calendar of men. The arrangement is offered as whimsy. It reads closer to a lease.

The film's engine is transformation. Sara exists to loosen Nelson's tie, teach him to notice children and small dogs, and administer a month of self-improvement before the inevitable weepy third act. When he proposes, we learn she has terminal lymphoma and has done this before, many times, with other men. The script treats this as tragic generosity. Roger Ebert saw two sick and twisted people playing mind games and calling it love, which remains the most efficient review the picture has received.

For classification purposes, the ledger stays blank. The cast is uniformly white. Race is never raised. There is no queer presence, no environmental concern, and no critique of the advertising trade beyond the suggestion that work is less pleasant than a beach. Sara's body serves as a device for mortality, not a subject of body politics. Nobody is neurodivergent. History is not revised, because history does not appear. The sermon, such as it is, concerns seizing the day, a message that has never once threatened a shareholder. The film was panned, nominated for three Razzies, and grossed $65.8 million against a $40 million budget. It is a monument to nothing much, which is its own kind of achievement.