P.S. I Love You Blu-ray Review
Dear Sir: Make a Better Movie
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, December 30, 2011
P.S. I Love You did respectable business in theatrical release (over $150 million worldwide on
a
$30 million production budget) and continues to perform well on home video. I understand the
reasons why, and I can produce both prior reviews and affidavits from character witnesses to
prove that I do enjoy romances, weepies and so-called "chick flicks". But
P.S. I Love You left
me cold for the simple reason that it's not a good film. A member of the target demographic I know
recently opined that the film's problem was the (mis)casting of Hilary Swank in the lead, instead
of a comedienne like Sandra Bullock. But I think the problem was director and co-screenwriter
Richard LaGravenese, who not only fails to find a consistent tone for the movie, but seems to
revel in jumping around tonally, even within the same sequence, so that you never know what
kind of movie you're watching (and eventually don't care). All that frantic leaping around is
needed to disguise the emptiness at the film's core. Kill off a lovable Joe (or Jack or Gerry), and
you can dependably draw tears, but that doesn't mean you've said anything worthwhile.
I have not read Cecelia Ahern's bestselling novel, on which the film is based, but I suspect she
pulled off these shifts more successfully. Ahern set her story entirely in Ireland, where certain
styles of both whimsy and dark humor seem right at home. Move the same events to America, as
the film does, and they have to be handled differently. And because prose is less specific than
film, leaving more for the reader's imagination to fill in, a writer can get away with narrative
sleights of hand that a director should never attempt. (Dickens did it repeatedly, which is why the
frequent coincidences on which his stories depend go down more smoothly on the page.)
LaGravenese should be the ideal filmmaker for the job, because his best work has resulted from
melding tonal opposites that, at first glance, shouldn't be in the same film. His Oscar-nominated
script for
The Fisher King required the unique talents of director Terry Gilliam to balance
its idiosyncratic combination of farce, fantasy and tragedy. His directorial debut,
Living Out
Loud, from his original script, paralleled elements of
P.S. I Love You in its exploration of a woman
trying to restart her life, but the heroine of
Living Out Loud was the divorced survivor of a
bad marriage, not a young widow crippled by grief. In his first venture as a director, LaGravenese
was free to explore comic and even ludicrous moments, and at one point to stage a Gilliam-style
fantasy, without having to worry about addressing such weighty matters as grief, mourning and
the loss of one's soulmate.
P.S. I Love You requires those issues to be taken seriously, and
both the film and the director buckle under the load.
Holly and Gerry (Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler) married young and against both their parents'
wishes, but they married for love. Still, the course of true love isn't running smooth. Holly
aspires to be a "planner", which is to say that she wants to have a "plan" for their married life
that will get them out of their fifth-floor walk-up on New York's Lower East Side, into a much
better life (the details of which are vague) where their
real life can begin. Holly doesn't
quite know what that'll be, but it involves children, and she doesn't have much of a plan to get there
either, running through jobs the way some people run through hobbies.
Gerry is a free spirit who lives for the moment. He met Holly when she was traveling through
Europe (the story comes out piecemeal in flashbacks) and followed her impulsively back to New
York. He'd be happy living with her anywhere in any circumstances. In the pre-credit sequence,
they're having a fight, because Gerry has said the wrong thing to Holly's mother, Patricia (Kathy
Bates), a battleaxe of a bar owner. Then they make up. Then the credits run. When they're over,
Gerry has died of a brain tumor, and everyone is at his wake.
Right away the film is off track. Irish wakes are legendary for their alcoholic lubrication, and if
the setting were still Ireland and Holly herself were Irish, LaGravenese might be able to get away
with the comedy he tries to extract from Gerry's funeral rites. But there isn't enough liquor
flowing, and the character of Holly as previously established before the credits is too brittle, to
create the right mood of laughing in the face of tragedy. So LaGravenese has to rely on secondary
characters: Gerry's business partner, John (James Marsters), playing a vulgar Irish drinking song
as Gerry requested; Holly's friend Denise, played by Lisa Kudrow with her trademark bluntness,
interviewing potential dates; another friend, Sharon (Gina Gershon), doing not much of anything;
Holly's sister, Ciara (Nellie McKay), waltzing in like she's attending a party; and Patricia's
bartender, Daniel (Harry Connick, Jr.), eyeing Holly with obvious interest. (At least he waits a
discreet interval to approach her, until her thirtieth birthday party, when he flirts with Holly as
ineptly as possible until she throws up all over his shoes.)
Funny stuff, right?
When Holly barricades herself in that fifth floor walk-up watching old movies while dirty dishes
and take-out containers pile up, it's unclear whether you're supposed to laugh or cry. Certainly
the scene where her mother and friends burst in on her singing along with Judy Garland in
A Star
Is Born is played for laughs. It's Holly's thirtieth birthday, and the group is there to take her
out. That's when the letters Gerry arranged to have delivered after his death begin arriving, the ones
that all end with "P.S. I love you", which give the film its title and marketing hook and are
supposed to help Holly heal and move on. But has anyone ever actually paid attention to what's
in those letters? How about the one that sends Holly to a karaoke bar, so that she can recall
the wonderful night she had when Gerry dared her up on stage where she made it through one hot
verse of Prince's "Gett Off" before tripping on a cable and landing in the hospital with a sprained
ankle, broken nose, her face swathed in bloody bandages and, by the look of it, big-time
expensive dental work ahead? Good times, treasured memories.
Consider, if you will, a character who
isn't played for comedy: Holly's mother, Patricia. Even
the great Kathy Bates can't quite make sense out of this figure who's more plot device than person.
Buried in the movie is one fine scene where, for a moment, Patricia comes to life. It's when
Holly tries to tell her mother how much worse off
she is because her husband died, whereas
Patricia's husband, Holly's father, only left. In Patricia's response, Bates gives you a glimpse of
the heartache that rejection caused her—and also of the steel that allowed her to bear the pain
while forging ahead and raising two daughters single-handedly. It's a welcome breath of realism
in a film that could use much more. Eventually, though, the film betrays even Patricia. When it's
over, go back and rewatch this scene, and indeed every other scene of Patricia's now that you
know her whole story. Even Kathy Bates can't make them believable.
Still, nothing better demonstrates the essential frivolity of
P.S. I Love You than its
treatment of—
spoiler alert!—Harry Connick, Jr.'s incoherently drawn bartender, Daniel.
Apparently directed to suppress every last iota of his natural charm (with hair and wardrobe to match),
Connick's character is one of the least convincing red herrings imaginable. Despite his obvious
crush, Daniel is wholly unsuitable as a love interest for Holly. For that, she has to return to
Ireland (in a trip arranged pre-mortem by Gerry), where she meets William (Jeffrey Dean
Morgan), a character invented for the movie. Without going into details, let's just say that
William could fairly be described as the second coming of Gerry. In the end, all the film's blather
about living for the moment and appreciating what you have now turns out to be so much
misdirection. The real solution to Holly's predicament comes from remaining stubbornly stuck in
the past until it repeats itself.
Only better this time, because Holly later returns to Ireland, this time bringing her mom to be
charmed and won over by the countryside and a bit o' blarney from an older gentleman.
Meanwhile, rugged William stands to one side with a roguish smile. He might as well have a
sign over his head that says, "I am the resurrection and the life—of Gerry." Snap!
