A 2008 film with an incredibly unwieldy title, Me & You, Us, Forever, tells the story of Dave (Michael Blain-Rozgay).  Dave is an advertising exec.  Originally from New York, he now lives in North Carolina.  He has only recently gotten divorced and he’s still struggling with his feelings.  His ex-wife makes it a point to call him from her new boyfriend’s house so that his name will appear on Dave’s caller ID.  Dave’s teenage daughters only spend a limited amount of time with him and, even if they are surprisingly open to playing Scrabble with him, it’s obvious that they’re growing up without him.  Dave’s business partner says that Dave needs to move on and just put his faith in God.  Dave, however, would rather think about Mary (Sandi Fix).

Mary was the girl that Dave dated during his senior year of high school.  He broke up with her while he was in college and he’s always regretted it.  He starts to think that maybe his life would have been perfect if he had just married Mary.  Dave’s business partners points out that God didn’t want Dave to marry Mary.  (But did God want Dave to marry the woman who cheated on him and now taunts him by calling him from her boyfriend’s house?)  One thing that no one mentions is that neither one of his daughters would exist if he had married Mary.

Even after Dave starts attending a Christian support group for divorced people and meet a single woman named Carla (Stacey J. Aswad), he can’t stop wondering about Mary.  Even after he finds out that she is now married and has a very good life with her husband and her family, Dave cannot stop thinking about Mary.  Even though everyone tells Dave that it’s a bad idea, he is determined to go to New York and see her.

The main problem with Me & You, Us, Forever (other than that really long title) is the fact that Dave’s dilemma is presented as being a crisis of faith when, in reality, he’s just an immature and selfish man who is having a midlife crisis.  Everyone keeps telling Dave that God doesn’t want him to try to get back together with Mary but really, you don’t have to be a Christian to realize that Dave’s plan isn’t a good one.  You just need common sense!  I’m sure that a Muslim would have been just as quick to tell Dave that seeing Mary was a bad idea as Dave’s Christian business partner was.  For that matter, I imagine many atheists would have had the same opinion.  Dave’s a jerk, regardless of his religious beliefs.

This is a Dave Christiano film so, not surprisingly, there’s some talk about how divorce is the work of the devil.  In reality, it’s sometimes best for people to get divorced.  Good people get divorced for a lot of reasons and it’s not always as simplistic as one person screwing up while the other essentially remains blameless.  (For instance, Dave never considers that his wife may have left him because she could tell he was still obsessed with an old high school girlfriend.)  My parents got divorced and it wasn’t necessarily easy for me and it led to me acting out in a lot of ways when I was younger but, all these years later, I’m now mature enough to understand that it was exactly what they needed to do.

This film is a long 91 minutes.  There are conversations that just seem to go on forever.  That said, I do think that  Christiano did an okay job with the scene in which Mary and Dave finally talk about their past and their present.  That scene was handled with a sensitivity that’s missing from most of the movie.  As well, I think Stacey J. Aswad gave a good performance as Carla.  She made Carla into a sympathetic character.  I couldn’t help but feel that she deserved a better friend than Dave.