Dream On: “The Secret” nice but can't sell hokey, simplistic contrivances

The Secret: Dare to Dream (2020)

101 min.

Release Date: July 31, 2020 (Digital & On-Demand)

Based on the allegedly groundbreaking 2006 best-seller “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, “The Secret: Dare to Dream” is a commercially viable translation starring Katie Holmes, but did it have to be so philosophically simplistic? What it achieves rather than poignancy or inspiring hope, though, is one’s cynicism to be unleashed. Despite its well-meaning platitudes and good intentions, the film doesn’t really set itself apart from any of the most blandly sunny Nicholas Sparks sudsers or Hallmark Channel Original Movies. It’s too nice and not misguided enough to trash, but there’s not much positivity to manifest in “The Secret: Dare to Dream" when so much of it pours on enough syrup to keep a Waffle House well-stocked.

Living outside New Orleans in a quaint town, widowed single mother Miranda Wells (Katie Holmes) is stressed and up to her eyeballs in debt. She manages a seafood restaurant and carries on a romantically indifferent relationship with her wealthy boss, Tuck Middendorf (Jerry O’Connell), but she’s even too broke to order pizza for dinner. Since the death of her husband, Miranda has tried to keep a roof over her and her three kids’ heads, but even that roof is leaky. One magically fateful afternoon at Miranda’s home, an optimistic Nashville professor named Bray Johnson (Josh Lucas) shows up with a sealed manila envelope before she arrives. Miranda and Bray actually meet cute over a fender bender, and he agrees to fix her front bumper. Bray is so wise and good to be true that he introduces a positive way of thinking through the law of attraction to Miranda and her family; her son Greg (Pierce Brennan) thinks of having pizza for dinner and pizza arrives around the start of a hurricane. That happens to be no cosmic coincidence, as Tuck actually ordered it, but following the hurricane that puts a hole in Miranda’s roof, Bray actually comes back the next morning to patch it up in no time. Though Miranda has lived with a cloud over her head—and a pushy, judgmental mother-in-law (Celia Weston)—life doesn’t have to be just “a series of unfortunate events." It can be  full of second chances that miraculously defy the odds.

There will surely be an audience receptive to swallowing the positive-thinking belief system behind Rhonda Byrne’s self-help book, but one gets the feeling that such a book was never destined to work as a motion picture. Struggling to sell profound, universe-answering happenstance as more than hokey movie contrivances, “The Secret: Dare to Dream” proves that assumption to be correct. Co-writing the script with Bekah Brunstetter and Rick Parks, director Andy Tennant (2010's "The Bounty Hunter") takes the fundamental concepts of the book and bakes them into a gauzy romantic drama with sentimental button-pushing and woo-woo crock peddling.

There has to be some sort of conflict at the center of “The Secret: Dare to Dream,” and naturally, said conflict could have been resolved from the very start but instead strings along Miranda (and the audience). Is Bray just a Good Samaritan who has collided with Miranda for a reason? Or, has Bray forced their entire meeting? Who Bray really is and what he keeps putting off with that manila envelope (which he placed in Miranda’s mailbox, only to be taken away by the hurricane into a nearby swamp) are constructed as, well, secrets. Though one gets an inkling of both answers as more bread crumbs are dropped, The Big Truths melodramatically culminate in a third act during Miranda’s daughter’s sweet sixteen party. Leaving no cliché unturned, the film even makes a ridiculous reveal for the identity of the woman Bray is seen talking to over the phone. All this pleasant-enough pap needed was a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

Emotional manipulation can certainly work in movies, but “The Secret: Dare to Dream” manages to be pat and more inoffensive than genuinely sweet or affecting. Katie Holmes (2020’s “Brahms: The Boy II”), with all her movie-star baggage, is quite believable as a working-class mother, and Josh Lucas is surely working the earnestness as the wise and charming, if duplicitous, Bray. Both performers seem to believe the material and almost make us believe, but too often does it seem like the story and characters are secondary to the spiritual principles in a treacly package. If the script deserves any merit, it’s how the supporting players—mainly Miranda’s mother-in-law and her boyfriend—are surprisingly not boxed in as strictly one-note villains the whole way through. Negativity and misfortune are the cruel mistresses here. Otherwise, you definitely won’t need to type out the resolution of “The Secret: Dare to Dream” on your vision board for it to come true. It comes off a little phony rather than comfy, and maybe that’s the real secret.

Grade: C