50 First Dates (2004)

Plot Summary of 50 First Dates (2004)

Several different women gossip separately with their groups of friends about a man named Henry that they met on their vacation to Hawaii, and they talk about the incredible week they each had with him. They tell their friends the excuses he gave them for why he wouldn’t be able to stay in touch after they left, and he had told every woman something different. Henry is at a dock with a woman as she’s about to leave for her trip back home from vacation.

He tells her that the reason he won’t be able to keep in touch is that he’s a secret agent, and it’s for her own protection that they never see each other again. He makes a dramatic exit, pretending to be called on a mission and jumping onto the back of a moving, already occupied jet ski. He pays the guy driving to go along with it. Henry goes back to the aquarium where he works to give his friend, Ula, some stitches after he got bitten by a shark.

Ula’s kids are all there and record the operation, giggling and joking with Henry at their father’s expense. Ula asks him how his week with his most recent tourist went. He warns Henry that if he keeps showing all of these women such a wonderful time, eventually one of them is going to decide to stay on the island. His coworker, Alexa, calls him in a hurry to help take care of a walrus that isn’t moving. He goes to check it out and discovers it just needs to burp.

He puts pressure on its belly until it vomits all over Alexa. Later, Henry works on his boat and takes it out for a test drive around the island to see if it will be ready for his trip to Alaska soon, but during the trial, several of the sails break. He takes a raft back to shore and decides to wait at a local restaurant while the Coast Guard comes to tow his boat. A few tables over, he notices a beautiful woman and watches as she makes an odd structure out of her waffles, resembling a house.

The woman and the waitress are on friendly terms, and Henry overhears that the woman’s name is Lucy. Henry talks with his coworker about Lucy as he gives a walrus an ultrasound. Alexa points out that Henry usually only goes for tourists, not women who already live on the island. She wonders if this is because Henry has intimacy issues. Alexa muses that maybe one of his previous lovers betrayed him, and Henry admits that his girlfriend in college cheated on him with one of their professors.

The next morning, Henry returns to the restaurant and sees Lucy making another construction site out of the waffles she ordered. He notices that she’s having trouble getting the door to her waffle house to work, so he helps her by using a toothpick. Charmed, she asks him to sit with her. They flirt for a while, and she tells him that she likes the way his hands smell like fish, since her father is a fisherman, and it reminds her of him. After a few hours of talking, the waitress kicks them out, explaining that they have to get the restaurant ready for lunch.

In the parking lot, Lucy explains that she has to leave because it’s her dad’s birthday, and every year they go pick a pineapple for him. She invites Henry to have breakfast with her again the next day, and he agrees. Later that day, Henry goes golfing with Ula and his children. Ula tells Henry that he was able to get a tourist’s phone number for him and that he should take her out on a date. He declines, saying he’s into someone else.

When it’s his turn to swing, Henry overshoots the hole and is forced to scramble down a cliff to retrieve his ball. Down on the beach, he sees Lucy, who kisses him and tells him she wants to spend every day with him. Henry wakes up on the green as Ula tells him that his ball ricocheted off the golf cart and hit him in the head. That night, Henry decides to call the tourist and go on a date with her because of his fear of getting too attached to Lucy.

The tourist drinks excessively and pretends to be drunk so she can sleep with him, but the entire time, Henry can’t stop thinking about Lucy. Henry admits to the woman that he isn’t who he claimed to be and that there isn’t actually any alcohol in the drinks. He tells her he can’t have sex with her because he’s interested in someone else. The next morning, Henry shows up at the restaurant to have breakfast with Lucy. The waitress tells him she needs to talk to him about Lucy, and Lucy walks into the restaurant and right past him to sit at her booth.

He goes to sit with her, but she doesn’t recognize him. The waitress pulls him outside to talk. She explains that about a year ago, Lucy and her father were in a car accident that severely injured Lucy’s frontal lobe. She can remember everything up until the day of the accident, but she’s unable to retain any new information. Every night when she goes to bed, the slate is pretty much wiped clean, and she lives the same day over and over again.

She lives with her brother and father, and they go to great lengths to make sure every day is the same day for her so she doesn’t get confused. After breakfast, Lucy goes home with her brother and father and wishes her father a happy birthday. He suggests that she paint his workshop for him since he painted it white and it looks too plain. She happily obliges. That night, they go through their routine of setting out a cake for her father, giving him presents, and watching the same movie before bed.

After Lucy goes to sleep, her brother and father repaint the workshop, removing all evidence of that night and setting the house up to look exactly like it did the previous morning. Henry confides in Ula, telling him all about Lucy’s memory problem. Ula suggests that Lucy might be the perfect girl for him because of her memory loss. If she has to meet him again every day, it could be great practice for Henry to work on his commitment issues, and if something goes wrong, he could disappear without her ever knowing or getting hurt.

The next morning, Henry returns to the restaurant and makes a bet with the cook that he can get Lucy to invite him to sit with her again. It doesn’t work, and he spends the next several mornings being rejected by her. One morning, he decides to pull out all the stops and makes a big scene about being upset because he can’t read. Concerned, Lucy goes to him, helps him with the menu, and invites him to sit with her so she can teach him how to read.

After they finish eating and say their goodbyes, Lucy calls Henry out, saying she knows his inability to read was just a ploy to get her to talk to him. She says she’s disappointed that he wasted her time because he never even asked for her phone number or to see her again. She drives off, leaving him baffled. That evening, Henry goes to Lucy’s house to apologize and meets her father instead.

Her father is suspicious of Henry’s intentions with his daughter and warns Henry to stay away from Lucy. Henry reluctantly agrees. At work, he talks with Alexa about his confusing situation and asks her for advice. She tells him that there are always ways around rules, that he should be more creative, and that he definitely shouldn’t give up on seeing Lucy if he likes her as much as he does.

Knowing Lucy’s route home from the restaurant, Henry spends the next several days using different schemes to get her to pull over and talk to him, pretending his car broke down or that he was being mugged. Eventually, Lucy’s brother and father catch on and meet him on the road while he’s trying to flag her down. They tell him they know what he’s up to and say they want to talk at their house later.

Henry meets them that afternoon, and her father explains that he can tell when Henry has seen Lucy because she only sings on days when they meet. They explain to Henry all the trouble they go through every day to take care of her. The next morning, Henry goes to see Lucy at the restaurant, and again she rejects him. She goes back outside to her car and sees a police officer writing her a ticket for her expired tags.

She freaks out because she thinks her tags are still in date, since she doesn’t know how much time has passed, and goes to look at the local paper to see what day it is. She becomes really confused and upset and drives back to her house, demanding an explanation from her father. Her father explains the accident to her, her memory loss, and shows her pictures from when she was in the hospital.

She wants to go to her doctor to have him explain it better to her, and Henry offers to go along so he can learn more about her condition. Her doctor shows them her brain scans and explains her condition, putting emphasis on the fact that she’s never going to recover and that she will think it’s the same day for the rest of her life. The doctor shows them around the institute and introduces them to several other patients affected by memory loss.

They return home, and before Lucy goes to bed, she tells Henry to talk to her about lilies the next morning at breakfast so he has a better chance of not striking out. Henry goes to leave, but her father invites him inside for a few beers. They discuss Lucy’s condition, and Henry can’t help thinking that there might be a better way to handle the days when she has to learn about her memory loss, and that she seems less freaked out about the accident and more upset that her brother and father have been lying to her.

As he leaves, he takes Lucy’s book of memories with him. The next morning, Henry brings Lucy lilies and a videotape, saying they’re from a secret admirer. They take the tape back to her house and watch it. It explains everything that has happened in the past year, her accident, and eventually how Lucy and Henry met. Lucy is still upset, but it doesn’t take her as long to get over it. Henry takes Lucy to the tree where the accident happened, and they have a romantic evening.

Lucy films Henry as he gives her details about himself so she can remember, and she asks him if he loves her, which he admits that he does. They go on several dates over the next few days, and every time they kiss, Lucy thinks it’s their first kiss. Henry takes her to the aquarium where he works and introduces her to some of the walruses he works with, having them perform some cute tricks for her. He takes her back to his room, and they make love.

That evening, he performs a song he wrote about her on his ukulele, and she loves it. They snuggle in her bed together, and right before they fall asleep, Henry asks Lucy to marry him, and she says yes. When they wake up the next morning, Lucy has no idea who Henry is and freaks out that there’s a stranger in her bed. She attacks him until her father and brother hear what’s going on and intervene.

They bring in Lucy’s doctor to check on the injuries she inflicted on Henry, and Lucy overhears Henry talking about the boat trip he’s been planning for years to Alaska. He says that he’s decided to abandon the trip because he doesn’t want to leave Lucy. After Henry arrives at work, Lucy meets him there and tells him that she wants to break up with him. She’s horrified that she’s completely taken over her father’s and brother’s lives, and she doesn’t want to do that to Henry too.

She explains that she’s kept a nightly journal about all of their dates and details about him, and that she plans to destroy it so that after they break up, she won’t have any memory of him. Henry protests, but eventually agrees to help her rewrite her journal without him in it. After they’ve typed up and printed her new journal, they burn the old one with all of her memories of Henry in it. They kiss one last time, and then Henry heads back home.

Henry tries his best to move on and spends a lot of time working on his boat to get it ready for the trip again. On bad days, he shows up at her house, but her dad won’t let him in. He sees her while he’s at work, and she doesn’t recognize him. At the dock, Ula and his kids come to tell him goodbye before he leaves on his trip to Alaska. To his surprise, Lucy’s father and brother also show up to wish him well.

Her father tells him that Lucy decided to go live at the memory institute because she was tired of being a burden to them. He says that she seems very happy there. Before Henry takes off, Lucy’s father hands him a gift. Once out on the water, Henry realizes the gift is a Beach Boys CD that Lucy loves to listen to. It upsets him deeply, but eventually he realizes this might have been a clue from Lucy’s father that she still remembers him.

He turns the boat around and rushes to the institute to see Lucy. Henry barges into the room where Lucy is teaching her art class. He asks her if she remembers him, and she says she doesn’t, but that she wants to show him something. Lucy takes Henry to her studio, which is covered in paintings of Henry. She explains that she dreams about him every night and can’t get his face out of her head. Henry tells her that they used to be lovers and that she broke up with him to try to protect him, but that she made a mistake.

They decide to get back together and kiss to make up. Several years later, Lucy wakes up in a strange bed with a tape sitting on the table beside her. The tape explains the accident, how she and Henry met, and that they’re married now. At the end of the tape, Henry’s voice tells her to put on a coat when she’s ready and come up to see him. Lucy goes upstairs and realizes she’s on a ship in Alaskan waters. Her father is fishing off the side of the boat, and Henry introduces Lucy to their daughter. Lucy seems confused but incredibly happy as she holds her little family.

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Plot Summary of 50 First Dates (2004)