This week brings us the online release of The Secret: Dare To Dream, a romantic comedy adaptation of Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne’s famous 2006 self-help book The Secret, which Oprah helped spawn a kind of self-actualization cult. From what I can glean about the book, which was itself adapted from a documentary Byrne produced, inspired partly by Wallace D. Wattle‘s 1910 book, The Science of Getting Rich, the gist of The Secret‘s thesis is “think positively and good things will happen,” a philosophy it calls the “law of attraction.”
Now there’s a rom-com version, sadly not titled “Magnets: How Do They Work?” (“Rules of Attraction” was also taken). It stars the random shuffle dream team of Katie Holmes (ex-Mrs. Tom Cruise), Josh Lucas (the voice of Home Depot), and Jerry O’Connell (the current Mr. Rebecca Romjin), with direction from Andy Tennant (Hitch, Sweet Home Alabama) and a script adapted by Bekah Brunstatter (This Is Us). Dare To Dream delivers The Secret‘s philosophy in classic Nicholas Sparks movie format, complete with deferred scholarships, single mothers finding love, and copious Spanish moss.
Holmes, constantly doing the weird side-faced smile that got her through Dawson’s Creek, plays Miranda Wells, a widowed mother of three to whom bad things just keep happening (presumably because she’s such a gloomy grumbleguss). On top of her dead husband, she needs a root canal she can’t afford, has a hole in her kitchen ceiling from a tree branch, and a beat-up minivan that needs a new bumper. She lives in gorgeous coastal Louisiana (seriously, Spanish moss is like crack for the directors of pseudo-religious schmaltz), where she works as some kind of vaguely defined fishmonger with strong feelings about softshell crabs. She’s too proud to let her boss, played by Jerry O’Connell, pay for anything, even though he wants to, even though he’s also her boyfriend. This man is named, improbably, “Tuck Middendorf.”
One day a gratingly sunny stranger with obnoxiously good posture hoves into Miranda’s life. That’s Bray, played by Josh Lucas (muthafuckas act like they forgot about Bray), who secretly has traveled all the way from Nashville to deliver Miranda a manila envelope, unbeknownst to her even after she rear-ends him with her car (it’s like they’ve been… brought together… by some kind of… mysterious attraction). He quickly becomes her unhired handyman, fixing her bumper and roof while delivering choice nuggets of wisdom to her grateful children. “Nature can be very powerful but so are you,” and “coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”
He is, essentially, a Magical Negro, rendered here in a Josh Lucasite shade of Caucasian. He’s even a professor of engineering at Vanderbilt, a great Magical White Bro job. We know basically from the jump that Bray’s secret Macguffin envelope will inevitably contain the solution to all of Miranda’s problems (will it just be a fax that says “DUMP TUCK MIDDENDORF?”) but it’s almost as if he has to wait until she puts on a sufficiently happy face before she can be worthy of receiving good news. Remember, kids, if bad things happen to you, it’s all your fault.
The first night Bray meets the Wells children, Miranda is busy ruining their dinner of microwaved chicken tenders (a clumsy dolt! the perfect relatable rom-com heroine!) while the children loudly fantasize about pizza. This is when Bray delivers his first soliloquy comparing mental desires to physical magnetism and assuring the children that they can have everything they want if they can only imagine it. The children all speak aloud the type of pizza they want, and literally seconds later the doorbell rings, revealing a pizza delivery guy with a couple hot pies even though a hurricane is about to hit.
It’s a staggeringly idiotic scene. But here’s where I admit that I don’t think everything The Secret preaches is entirely bankrupt. At one point, Josh Lucas tells his hotel clerk “How can you achieve your goal if you can’t see it?”
If you strip away the unsolicited nature of this advice and pedantic delivery, there’s a kernel of genuine if obvious wisdom there: the first step towards achieving your goals is identifying what they are. That’s not so crazy!
Of course, because we are a nation of idiot children, it’s not sufficient to offer this reasonable advice, as one adult would to another, we have to convince people that they can literally manifest fresh hot pizzas with their mind. This is a close cousin to the kind of prosperity doctrine peddled by overscrubbed pastors at nü-Christian megachurches everywhere. It’s not enough to promise everlasting life in a forever utopia to all those who do unto others, love thy neighbor, and remember the poor and the meek, and whatnot. This is America, we need the good shit tomorrow. Strike that, right now. Not only will you go to heaven, you might even get a Lamborghini. It’s the gentle reassurance of religion mutated by capitalism’s relentless drive for instant gratification.
As Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1972, “This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
I think about that quote a lot lately, for obvious reasons, and it rattled around in my head more than a few times while I was watching The Secret: Dare To Dream, a movie whose relevant insights are constantly undercut by mind pizza. It’s like we’re so accustomed to constant grifting that we can’t even recognize good advice unless it’s delivered in the form of a wild-eyed huckster making outrageous claims. “Visualize my goals and achieve them, that’s sounds pretty goo–” “ALSO YOU GET A RANGE ROVER AND A HOT SWEATER HUSBAND!”
Anyway, just shut up your brain and listen to your wise uncle Josh Lucas. He’s a professor at Vanderbilt, for God’s sake, and have you seen this man’s posture? If you can stop being such a nattering nabob of negativity for a while you just might find yourself dumping your shitty boyfriend, going back to school, and living in a gorgeous mansion with a wrap-around porch outside Nashville. With Spanish moss as far as the eye can see and a soft-shell crab in every pot.
‘The Secret: Dare To Dream’ opens on premium video On-Demand July 31st, from Lionsgate films. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.